Equity Bank’s half year pretax profits increased by 18% to Ksh 14.23 billion ($140.50 million) from Ksh 12.1 billion. This was mainly driven by a 37% increase in net interest income to Ksh 21.2 billion.
The Bank’s net profit grew to Ksh 10.1 billion ($99.6 million) from Ksh8.6 billion ($84.8 million) posted in a similar period in 2015 while operating expenses rose by 26% year on year, mainly driven by growth in loan loss provisions.
The Bank’s customers for the period ended June 2016 increased to 10.7Million from 9.7Million reported in June 2015. This in turn pushed its customer deposits to Ksh 320.8 billion from Ksh 301 billion.
Equity Bank said its regional subsidiaries performed dismally, contributing a mere 5% of the profits with South Sudan contributing to “Zero” as Profits from the war torn country fell by 112%.
The bank said the value of transactions on Equitel stood at Ksh 97.8 billion shillings at the end of June versus 49.5 billion in June 2015. James Mwangi the CEO said that more transactions are now processed under 3rd party infrastructure with the number of agents increasing to 26,593.
On the other hand, merchant commissions grew by 34% to Ksh 514Million with merchant outlets also growing to 8,517 as at end of June 2016. This was attributed to the adoption of cashless economy by Kenyans. Total assets rose to Ksh 444.4 billion from Ksh 400.9 billion posted a year earlier.
