Metropolitan Bank & Trust Company (Metrobank) reported an unaudited consolidated net income of P8.5 billion for the third quarter of 2019, representing a 49 percent increase year-on-year.
This brings the bank’s total income for the nine-month period to P21.6 billion.
Metrobank’s solid performance was attributed to the consistent growth in operating revenues on the back of moderate loan growth and margin expansion, strong trading and FX gains, and higher fee-based income.
“The bank is proud to have sustained strong growth momentum by navigating well amid the dynamic movements in the local economy. We continue to focus on customer service, profitability, and quality growth,” said Metrobank President Fabian Dee.
“As always, our philosophy centers on providing solutions so that our customers can have meaningful banking experiences,” he added.
As of September, Metrobank’s CASA ratio improved to 64 percent of the bank’s P1.6 trillion total deposits.
This provided liquidity to support loan growth of 7 percent to P1.4 trillion.
Aligned with the performance of the Philippine economy, credit demand was mainly broad-based, led by the corporate segment.
For the nine months, Metrobank’s net interest income grew 10 percent to P56.2 billion, and accounted for 70 percent of the bank’s total revenues of P80.0 billion.
Net interest margin further expanded to 3.91 percent, from 3.83 percent in the first half of 2019.
The bank’s non-interest income rose 36 percent to P23.7 billion.
This included P10.0 billion in service fees and commissions, P8.1 billion in net trading and FX gains, and P0.9 billion in fees from asset management.
Fee-based revenues as well as trading gains continued to benefit from increased customer flows in fixed income and foreign exchange, as well as opportunities in the financial markets.
With the continued focus on improving efficiency and productivity, operating expense growth was kept at a reasonable level of 9 percent. This, coupled with relatively strong revenue growth for the period, led to an improvement in the cost-to-income ratio to 54 percent, from 58 percent last year.
Asset quality metrics continued to be better-than-industry, with non-performing loans (NPL) ratio recorded at 1.5 percent.
The bank set aside P7.8 billion provisions for credit and impairment losses, aligned with the increase in its asset portfolio. This pushed NPL cover higher to 96 percent, from 87 percent in June 2019.
Metrobank’s consolidated assets and equity stood at P2.3 trillion and P304.7 billion, respectively. Total capital adequacy ratio was at 17.6 percent with Common Equity Tier 1 ratio of 16.3 percent.
On October 16, 2019, the bank received the SEC Order fixing the Record Date of the 13 percent Stock Dividend on October 31, 2019. This is equivalent to 517,401,955 shares that will be issued at the Philippine Stock Exchange on November 26, 2019.
On October 24, 2019, Metrobank listed P13.75 billion Series B bonds at the Philippine Dealing & Exchange Corporation. The Bank has raised an aggregate of P70.5 billion from offerings of Peso bonds since November 2018.
Metrobank is the country’s premier universal bank and has one of the largest domestic networks with over 950 branches and over 2,300 automated teller machines (ATMs) nationwide, and over 30 foreign branches, subsidiaries and representative offices.
