Even by the usually strong standards of Middle Eastern and north African lenders, the results of the The Banker’s Top 100 Arab Bank’s rankings for 2014 were impressive. Aggregate Tier 1 capital increased from $209.8bn to $233.1bn, a year-on-year improvement of 11.08%. Encouragingly, these gains were well reflected across the Arab World, although Gulf-based banks once again dominated in terms of overall growth. Moreover, this signals an upward trend from the 8.86% increase recorded in last year’s rankings, and goes some way to catching up with the impressive 15.3% posted in the 2012 rankings.
Notably, the region’s banks scored well across most metrics with increases to total assets growing by 12.2% from $1948bn to $2187bn. Similarly, pre-tax profits grew by 10.94% to $37.8bn, up from $34.1bn last year. However, banks’ aggregate return on capital witnessed a marginal decrease, from 16.25% to 16.23% this year, though this still compares favourably with most regions globally. Perhaps most encouragingly, there was an improvement of Arab banks’ aggregate capital assets ratio from last year’s rankings. From 10.35% last year, this figure has grown to 10.66%, in line with the broader strength of the regional banking market.
