BPI Family seen doubling profit, resources in 5 yrs

The country’s largest thrift bank, BPI Family Savings Bank, seeks to cement its market leadership by doubling its earnings, asset size, customer base, lending portfolio and deposit base in the next five years.

This means growing the bank’s resources to about P540 billion in five years from P270 billion as of the end of 2016. This suggests reaching the same scale as those of some commercial banks like China Bank and Development Bank of the Philippines.

“We hope to replicate our growth performance in the past five years. We’re doubling again in the next five years,” newly installed BPI Family president Maria Cristina Go said in a briefing on Wednesday.

This year, BPI Family Bank is projecting a net profit growth of 10 percent from last year’s P4.4 billion. The bank expects to grow its loan book by 4- to 5- percent to P210 billion, slower than the 15-percent growth seen last year, deliberately curbing growth to tighten credit controls now that a national credit bureau is in place.

“We are more prudent at this time. We are reviewing our credit models because we have aggressively grown in the past and we have to make sure that we manage the risks as well,” Go said.

“Lending has its own attendant risks and we have to make sure that our credit losses are within our credit boundaries. That’s why we’re doing a lot of process improvements, streamlining and reviewing our credit models,” she said.

Over the next five years, the bank BPI Family aims to double its net profit from last year’s level. This is anchored on the projected doubling of its loan book to P400 billion.
On the funding side, deposit base is also projected to double to P480 billion even on an already big base, Go said.

BPI Family sees its customer base breaching the two-million milestone in five years, doubling the 1.1 million base at present.

The thrift bank targets the “broad C” income segment, or individuals earning between P20,000 and P50,000 monthly. —Doris Dumlao-Abadilla