The Bangladesh subsidiary of Commercial Bank of Ceylon edge up 3 per cent in 2020, in a mirror image to its parent company, which saw its profit shrink 3.8 per cent on higher provisioning requirement for the pandemic.
The bank, which provides full-fledged retail banking, logged in a profit of Tk 158.9 crore for the year, which is its highest yet in 17 years of its operations in Bangladesh.
The profit was thanks to higher investment income, which offset the loss from reduced lending opportunities for the pandemic.
Its investment income soared 2.8 times to Tk 136.5 crore as the bank poured in money generously on Treasury bills and bonds.
Its net interest income contracted about 25 per cent to Tk 143.6 crore on reduced lending opportunities for the pandemic.
At the end of 2020, its loans and advances stood at Tk 5,539.5 crore, up 15.4 per cent from a year earlier.
Its default loan ratio is 0.6 per cent, down from 0.75 per cent in 2019 -- remarkable as the banking sector’s average is 7.7 per cent.
It kept a provisioning of Tk 14.2 crore in 2020, which is more than double that from a year earlier, although the Bangladesh Bank had put a bar on loan classification for 2020.
Its deposits swelled 12.4 per cent to Tk 5,100 crore.
The bank, which has 11 branches, two offshore banking units and 6 SME centres, has a loan-deposit ratio of 77.48 per cent at the end of 2020, up from 75.33 per cent a year earlier.