In 2015, many African Banks faced lots of challenges mainly due to tumbling commodity prices and volatile currency movements which contributed to weak performance of most of the continent’s big lenders in the 2016 ranking of The Banker Magazine, a publication of the Financial Times.
Amid these challenges, three Kenyan NSE Listed lenders performed relatively well in the 2016 rankings by recording positive Tier 1 capital growth. Equity Bank has been ranked as the fastest growing lender in Africa with a 29.87% growth and at position 835 globally. Cooperative Bank was the third fastest growing bank in Africa with a 10.94% growth while KCB came in at position 8 with a 2.24% growth as shown in the table below.
Kenya Commercial Bank and Equity Bank both joined the continent’s Top 25 table in 2016 which can be partly be attributed to the performance of the Kenyan shilling in 2015, which declined modestly against the US dollar relative to many other African currencies.
South Africa
Three South African lenders, Standard Bank, FirstRand and Nedbank all secured the respective top three positions but they still suffered in the rankings largely as a result of the depreciating rand. Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank has now fallen from 123rd place to 160th. All six South African banks in this year’s Top 1000 World Banks ranking registered a fall in Tier 1 capital. In each case, this decline was by more than 10% year on year.
Nigeria & Togo
Nigeria was not different from other major banking markets in Africa. In 2015, 13 lenders from the country were featured in the global ranking. In 2016 this has fallen to 10, with only two banks, Access Bank and Ecobank Nigeria, registering gains to their Tier 1 capital positions.Togo’s Ecobank Transnational retained its global ranking of 306th and has moved up the regional table one place to sixth.
Egypt & Ethiopia
The dominance of Egyptian lenders in the top five banks by return on capital table has been cemented with the addition of Banque Misr, though the list is topped by Ethiopia’s CBE.
