Cover Story
Diamond Bank poised to regain lustre
By TESLIM SHITTA-BEY
Diamond Bank Plc had a tough business year in 2015. Like other banks, it had to face the challenge of an incoming administration unsure of policies and uncertain of its goals. The early policy confusion of the Mohammadu Buhari administration spawned a harsh business environment with inflation doubling from 9 per cent at the beginning of the year to 18.9 per cent by year end. This saw several banks scrambling for cash and fresh deposits as the federal government withdrew over N2.2 trillion from the banking system to throttle inflationary pressure and reestablish fiscal order.
Analysts note that the baggage of the 2015 monetary turmoil left several deposit money banks (DMB’s) temporarily weak, and saw Diamond bank take a mild knock. But the banks investors and other stakeholders have since found reasons to look at the bank in more cheery light in recent months as its operating fundamentals gradually grow back to full strength. First quarter 2017 (Q1) net interest income of the bank rose from N25.3billion in Q1 2016 to N44.5 billion in Q1 2017, representing a 24.5 per cent leap in the earnings of the bank’s core business of lending. The bank equally witness a per cent rise in its net interest margin which scaled up from per cent Q1 2016 to per cent in the contemporary period of 2017.
The uptick in the bank’s performance appears to have been driven by deliberate switches in its operating focus. ‘We have paid a lot more attention to our digital and mobile banking platforms, this has helped us push operating income up a notch, we were able to trampoline earnings from mobile operations by per cent from N270 million in Q1 2016 to N1.2 billion in Q1 2017’, says a staff of the bank who declined to be mentioned because he was not officially authorized to comment on the matter. According to the bank staff, ‘ we have decided to bite a few nasty bullets by charging higher impairment costs to our P & L account, but that should help us get stronger and have tidier books in the current year’.
An opinion echoed by the bank’s chief executive officer, Uzoma Dozie, in a recent press release where he underlined the opinion that the bank was on the mend with a rebound in its assets which surged from a drop of per cent between 2014 and 2015 to a strong hike of per cent between yearend 2015 and 2016.
Source: Diamond Bank audited annual accounts, 2017f represents Business Hallmark forecast
Diamond Bank Q1 2017 SWOT
