Q: Commercial Bank has seen profits drop in recent years as the whole Qatari banking sector has faced a more restrictive landscape. How are you combating this?
A: I joined Commercial Bank last June, and the first thing we did was put together a five-year strategic reshape plan. On all those measures, Commercial Bank is doing well – in fact, we are ahead of the timelines. We successfully executed a rights issue for QR1.5bn [$412m] in January to strengthen our core equity Tier 1 capital from 10% to 11.4%. We are cleaning up our legacy loan book and we have taken a significant number of provisions, which we aim to finish by the end of 2017. Our cost-to-income ratio was 45%, well above the market average of 30%. We have brought that down to 38% already and by the end of the year, I’m hoping we will further improve on that figure.
