High returns on assets (ROA) are usually the province of emerging markets, but this was not strictly the case in the 2016 Top 1000 World Banks ranking. While many of the world’s highest ROAs came from banks in South America, the US bucked the trend and its banks delivered some of the strongest performances worldwide.
Banco Compartamos from Mexico, which sits in 948th place in the global list, earned the highest ROA in the ranking with 15.44%. Regionally, the bank is followed by two Argentinean institutions, Banco Macro and Banco de la Nacion Argentina, both of which performed well with ROAs of 7.14% and 6.62%, respectively.
However, the second highest ROA in the ranking was delivered by United National Corporation, a US bank, which earned a return of 12.92%. Strong performances from the US also included Lauritzen Corporation and American Express Company, with ROAs of 7.87% and 4.92%, respectively.
Africa did not report a very good performance this year. While regional leader Capitec Bank Holdings from South Africa managed to improve its ROA by 0.5 percentage points to 7.1%, other local lenders, such as Equity Bank from Nigeria and Guaranty Trust Bank from Kenya, showed declines.
