Brac Bank
Brac Bank’s offering is not just devoted to small and medium-sized enterprises. There are good retail and corporate banking divisions at work here, too. But finding thriving Bangladeshi corporates and extending finance to them is what Brac Bank has been doing better than any of its domestic peers since it was founded 16 years ago.
Under chief executive Selim Hussain, Brac Bank has honed its attention on SMEs, increasing its share of overall lending to smaller enterprises to 39% of the total loan book at the end of 2016, up from 34% a year earlier. Hussain told Asiamoney that he wants that share – which had slipped before his arrival in December 2015 – to pass 50% by 2020.
And this is not just rhetoric: while Brac Bank under Hussain is intent on becoming the best overall lender in Bangladesh in the medium term, it is also clearly focused on cementing its place as the country’s most committed and preeminent SME lender.
In 2016, the bank’s outstanding SME portfolio expanded on an annualized basis by 28%, or Tk13.8 billion ($172 million), while the ratio of bad loans to overall lending in the SME division fell to 3.7% in December 2016, against 7.6% a year earlier.