STB Bank has just published its financial statements for the first half of 2024, highlighting a strengthening of its financial resilience.
In the first half of 2024, STB followed the same trend as in the first quarter in terms of the development of customer deposits, with an average annual growth rate of 9% to reach an outstanding amount of 10.6 billion dinars.
Deposits with stable growth
This growth, which was fully in line with the expected objectives, concerned stable deposits, and in particular savings deposits, in order to preserve the comparative advantages of the STB, and to a slightly lesser extent sight deposits, which grew at an annual rate of 8.9% and 7.1% respectively.
As for time deposits, their share of 18.7% remained below the 20% mark. These developments reflect the Bank’s objective of maintaining a stable and diversified deposit base while keeping its costs under control.
With regard to financing activities, and taking into account the economic situation, gross outstanding customer loans decreased and stabilized at 11.9 billion dinars.
A transformation ratio of 104.9%
In addition to the significant improvement in the LTD transformation ratio, which reached 104.9% against a maximum threshold of 120%, these developments also had a positive impact on the Bank’s use of BCT resources, which decreased from 816 million dinars to 261 million.
At the same time, the Bank consolidated its efforts to finance the public debt by participating in the various auctions of comparable treasury bills and subscribing to the various tranches of bond loans issued by the State. The outstanding amount of government securities was thus increased to 2.6 billion dinars, an increase of 7.6%.
However, the stock of high-quality liquid assets peaked at 2.3 billion dinars to bring the LCR liquidity ratio to 311% against a regulatory minimum of 100%. Thus, a fairly comfortable liquidity cushion has been established, which is necessary for the resumption of financing activities.
An NBI of 316 million dinars
With regard to the evolution of the activity aggregates, the net banking income amounted to 316 million dinars, compared to 340 million dinars in the previous year, and which would have been higher had it not been for the decline in the net interest margin caused by the targeted reduction in lending activity.
STB on the hunt for operating expenses
It should also be noted that the Bank has made considerable efforts to limit the growth of operating expenses, in particular general operating expenses, which fell from 52.6 million dinars to 45.6 million dinars, a decrease of 7 million dinars.
The combination of the above factors enabled the Bank to improve its TIER 1 and TIER 2 solvency ratios by almost 50 percentage points, to 10.6% and 13.97% respectively, thereby consolidating its resilience and providing additional capacity for its development.
