In a clear show of resilience and strong market share in the Nigerian banking industry, Zenith bank posted impressive gross earnings of N531bn for the 9 months to 30th September 2017. This represents an increase of 40% year-on-year and 5% year-to-date, and in fact the highest published by any bank in the Nigerian Banking industry in the current reporting period.
The bank demonstrated its ability to take the right actions and make the right choices in its Assets and Liability management strategies culminating in an increase of 27% in interest income from N285.7bn as at 30 September, 2016 to N361.8bn as at 30 September 2017. The bank was able to strategically switch assets in favour of high yielding asset classes and was also able to optimally price its assets in a yield environment.
Also Non-interest income grew 79% year-on-year to 169.5bn driven by the bank’s ability to take advantage of its strong foreign currency liquidity to generate income.
The Profit before tax (PBT) and Profit after tax (PAT) of Zenith witnessed an impressive growth of 31% and 35% year-on-year respectively to N152.5bn and N129.2bn. Again this is a show of resilience and demonstration of the ability of this financial institution to innovate and create impressive value from resources available to it.
We note further that Zenith achieved this excellent financial performance, despite adopting a very conservative approach to recognizing potential losses in its risk asset portfolio.
The bank has continued to maintain solid and high quality capital position with capital adequacy ratio at 21% well above statutory requirement of 15% and providing room for further growth and strong and consistent dividend payout. Liquidity ratio remains strong at 61% and also well above the regulatory requirement of 30%.
Consistent with this superlative performance and in recognition of its track record of excellent performance, the bank was recently honoured as The Bank of the Year and Best Bank in Customer Service by the publishers of BusinessDay Newspapers
