KCB Group CEO Joshua Oigara speaks during the half year financial results announcement in Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP The KCB Group chief executive Joshua Oigara spoke with James Anyanzwa on the bank’s post-Covid-19 plans.
KCB just released financial results for quarter 1 (Q1), 2020, showing an eight per cent growth in profit after tax. Are you happy with this performance?
Under the prevailing circumstances it is a good performance. Our business is growing within all lines, our assets are up, loans are up, our non-funded income has increased and overall revenue is up. We have seen some increase in our level of provisions, and our costs are well managed. We have also seen a lot of customers migrating their transactions into our mobile and digital platforms. So this is a good performance. We are aware that we are facing an unprecedented global crisis but it came late in the quarter so the challenge will be in the second quarter and perhaps the rest of 2020.
Paint for us a picture of how your international subsidiaries performed in Q1 in the wake of Covid-19.
The greatest issue on our business is that we have integrated National Bank which is a new acquisition in Kenya, so it played a big part on our performance in the quarter. NBK performed well and that is an important aspect to note. But generally all our businesses internationally have grown compared with the same period last year. From Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan we are seeing strong performance compared with the same situation last year.
Uganda faced some difficulties but recovered. We are on track in terms of posting double-digit growth and forecast a more than 20 per cent growth year-on-year. Our subsidiaries have remained resilient and in Q1 we have seen a very important contribution from them.
How much of your loan portfolio have you restructured to cushion households and businesses during this period and which loans have been largely affected?
So far, we have restructured Ksh110 billion ($1.1 billion) which has been growing over time. So if you think about our loan book value, which is Ksh554 billion ($5.54 billion), and we have done only Ksh110 billion ($1.1 billion), we are still below 20 per cent.
We believe in our own forecast that about 25 per cent of the loan book will be affected in this crisis because by the […]
