Fifteen years ago, the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank, known as PTA Bank, was in crisis, unable to fulfil its mandate of fostering regional economic integration. Its small size – it had less than $300m of assets – and the poor state of its balance sheet, meant it struggled to provide the funding needed to fuel cross-border trade between its 18 member countries, which cover a large swathe of the continent from Egypt in the north down to Zimbabwe in the south. “Ten years ago, our non-performing loan [NPL] ratio was in the teens,” says Admassu Tadesse, president and chief executive of the multilateral bank. “Those were the bad days.”
Much has since changed at PTA Bank, which is based in Burundi. It boasted $2.5bn of assets at the end of 2013, 38% more than a year earlier. Its NPL ratio has fallen to just over 4%.
