By Nse Anthony-Uko
ABUJA, (Sundiata Post) – SunTrust Bank Nigeria Limited has grown its deposit base by 432 per cent to N4.2 billion in its financial year ended 2016, barely one year of its operations as Commercial Bank.
The Bank, which received the approval of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to operate as a regional commercial bank on September 17, 2015, also declared a profit before tax of N343 million, an increase of 160.3 per cent over the N131.9 million reported in 2015.
The bank recorded an increase in its profit despite the massive rise in its income tax expense which moved from N10 million to N130.6 million, resulting in profit after tax of 74.6per cent increase to N212.7 million from N121.8 million in 2015.
With growth in profitability, earnings per share (EPS) gained 12.5 per cent to 18 kobo in 2016 from 16 kobo recorded in 2015. Following the above, return on equity (ROE) moved from 1.2 per cent to two per cent.
The bank said it leveraged on its broad range of unique financial services and products to individuals, small businesses, corporation and the government to grow its customer deposits despite the 2016 recession that led to severe macro economy challenges and poor performance for many businesses.
Also, the Bank effectively managed its interest expenses that impacted positively on net interest Income in 2016.
Recall that the chief executive of the bank, Muhammed Jubrin, recently assured operators in the small and medium scale enterprises sector that his bank will focus on the small businesses by availing financing and thus ensuring that the sector plays its pivotal role in the economy.
Jubrin said, “In line with our strategy, we are going to drive SMEs transactions certainly and part of our strategy is retail banking, we want to create a retail bank of choice and certainly SMEs is the engine room for the growth of any economy and to provide financing services, to support the SMEs will be the only way, we can support the growth of the economy and particularly in line with the vision of the CBN and the current administration.”
Commenting further on the operations of the bank, the CEO explained that, “We will offer telephone, mobile and Internet banking underpinned by the traditional banking ethics of probity and integrity.”
The bank’s competitive edge will be the strong reliance on technology and the bank will be encouraging customers to access its services from the comfort of their homes and offices and as such the bank will not be engaging in a proliferation of branches.
“Our services will be available to our customers 24 hours daily, seven days a week and from anywhere in the world where there is a good Internet service.
“Even our data centre is outsourced, this way we will not have the overbearing requirement to put on the generator at our locations,” he explained.
By adopting a branchless strategy, SunTrust will save the N100m-N120M required to build a modern branch and the about N2.5m it costs to run the generators at a typical bank branch.
Customers of SunTrust are encouraged to use any bank ATM because the bank will not be charging them the fee charged by other banks for using ATM machines belonging to other banks.
According to the CEO, “we will not be emphasising physical security as we are making serious investment in cyber security instead.”
