While Singapore’s largest banks still head The Banker’s Top 100 Asean ranking, Indonesian lenders have registered strong Tier 1 capital growth and Cambodia leads in pre-tax profits. Stefania Palma reports.

Indonesian banks have performed strongly in The Banker’s 2018 Top 100 Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) ranking. The total number of Indonesian banks in the top 10 has grown from two to three. Bank Mandiri has jumped from seventh to fifth place, while Bank Rakyat Indonesia and Bank Central Asia (BCA) have climbed four and two places, respectively, to sixth and ninth.

Banks in Indonesia also top the ranking by return on assets (ROA). Though the top bank is a foreign name, Deutsche Bank Indonesia, a fully domestic lender, BCA is in second place with an ROA of 3.82%.

Relative to their Indonesian peers, Malaysian lenders perform poorly in the top 10 of the overall ranking. However, foreign banks based in Malaysia dominate the tables for specific performance indicators. Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Malaysia heads tables for Tier 1 capital and asset growth. Meanwhile, Standard Chartered Malaysia posted the biggest pre-tax profit growth, a whopping 829.21%.

Indeed, the total number of Malaysian banks in the ranking has climbed year on year from 21 to 22. While Malaysian banks registered an aggregate drop in total assets for the second year in a row, the drop decreased from 11.47% in their 2016 results to 1.07% in 2017. The same applies in pre-tax profits, where the drop diminished from 20.37% to 2.95% in the same period.

Singapore stays up

On aggregate, Indonesian banks registered the biggest year-on-year jump in Tier 1 capital, at 29.71%, followed by Cambodian lenders at 19.65%. But Singaporean banks registered the biggest absolute volume of Tier 1 capital ($69.76bn), as was the case in the previous ranking. This is significant given that there are only four Singaporean banks in the ranking, one more (Standard Chartered Bank Singapore) than in 2017. More broadly, the 100 banks featured in the Asean listing collectively registered a strong jump in Tier 1 capital, from $245.85bn in 2016 results to $272.94bn in 2017.

Singaporean banks remain strong lenders, taking the top three spots in the following order: DBS Bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation and United Overseas Bank, exactly as in the 2017 ranking. Singapore’s banks also collectively posted the highest volume of total assets at $872.05bn, up from $825.56bn in 2016.

In terms of assets, Brunei registered the highest year-on-year growth (22.94%), despite the total number of Brunei banks in the ranking falling from two to just one, Bank Islam Brunei Darussalam.

Meanwhile, Cambodian banks lead the way in terms of aggregate pre-tax profit growth. Together, the two Cambodian banks in the ranking, Acleda Bank and Canadia Bank, registered a 20.57% pre-tax profit rise to $241m, partly because they were starting from a low base. Indeed, Vietnam’s 18 banks in the ranking posted the second highest pre-tax profit growth (18.91%), taking the aggregate value to a much higher $2.28bn.  

Asean ranking 0418

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