BREAKING NEWS, Business
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The Fidelity Bank Plc has announced a profit-before-tax of N4 billion for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016
THE financial highlights of the bank which was made available to Realnews on Sunday, May 1, showed that Fidelity’s gross earnings decreased by 5.5 percent to N34.4 billion from N36.4 billion in first quarter 2015. Its net interest income increased by 30 percent to N16.1billion from N12.4billion in first quarter of 2015.
The bank said its financial performance for the quarter is reflective of the continued slowdown in business activities; due to lower government revenues arising from depressed oil prices, lower interest rate regime and weaker macro-economic environment.
“We continued to improve the earnings capacity of our balance sheet (fund based income) despite the decline in fee income. Though gross earnings declined by 5.5% (due to a N4.2 billion drop in our foreign exchange income), net interest income increased by 30.0%, e-banking income by 216% and net operating income by 6.2% respectively.
“In line with our focus on balance sheet optimization, we ensured that the reduction in funding costs outpaced the decline on yields on earning assets. This improved our NIM to 7.3% from 6.9% in the 2015FY.
“Though operating expenses increased by 15.7% YOY, expense growth was flat when compared with 2015FY quarterly annualized figures and actually declined by 24.1% from Q4 2015.
“Our cost of risk remained within our guidance of 1.0% as we saw a decline of our risk asset portfolio in most sectors due to the weaker macro-economic indices, overall loan growth of 2.1% was basically driven by public sector on-lending facilities,” the bank said.
The bank’s NPL ratio declined to 4.3 percent largely due to the growth in the loan book while its regulatory ratios remained well above the set thresholds, our capital adequacy ratio at 19.3% gives us ample leverage to take advantage of emerging business opportunities.
Its total deposits increased by 1.9 percent and the disciplined execution of our retail strategy continued to deliver strong results as savings deposits grew by 13.4 percent in the quarter under review.
“Our key objectives for the 2016FY remains; redesigning our systems and processes to enhance service delivery, cost optimization initiatives to reduce expenses by 5%, proactive risk management, increased customer adoption/migration to our digital platforms and increasing our retail banking market share,” the bank said.
— May 1, 2016 @ 10:55 GMT
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