Sy family-led China Banking Corp. sees itself in a good position to absorb future shocks and lead stakeholders into the postpandemic era.
During the bank’s stockholders meeting on Thursday, president William Whang reported that over 173,000 of its customers had benefited from the grace period offered by Bayanihan 1 and another 125,000 under Bayanihan 2. These two pieces of legislation are part of the country’s rescue plan for the economy.
“We continuously engaged with our customers adversely impacted by the pandemic on how we can help ease their financial burden. This also helped us maintain our asset quality, with an NPL (nonperforming loan) ratio of 2.3 percent, better than industry average. Additional provisioning improved our NPL cover to 128 percent,” Whang said.
Cybersecurity
He added the bank focused on building customers’ confidence in transacting online. The bank launched new mobile app features to make it easy and secure for customers to transfer funds to anyone using their mobile numbers or email addresses.
The bank also waived fund transfer fees and strengthened cybersecurity to encourage customers to safely transact from home.
Amid the ongoing public health crisis, Whang said China Bank was able to fulfill its purpose of helping households and businesses stay afloat while ensuring the safety and well-being of its employees and customers.
Loans
“Even as economic activity drastically dropped during lockdowns, we supported our customers with P572 billion in gross loans. In addition to loans, we also helped our corporate borrowers raise funds via the bond markets, in which China Bank Capital played a leading role,” he said.
The bank is also launching this year its vaccination program for employees.
“We have been living with this pandemic for a year now, and we have learned a lot that we are able to deal with it better. In fact, our first quarter results show how we continue to rise to the challenge—our net income surged 61 percent to P3.6 billion,” he said.
Despite the overall downturn last year, Chinabank attained a 20-percent growth in net income to P12.1 billion.