More than half of the credit granted by the National Investment Bank (BNI) was in default at the end of the first quarter of 2024, but the majority of Mozambican banks also maintained ratios above the 5% recommended by the central bank.
In the report on the Prudential and Economic-Financial Indicators for the first quarter, published by Banco de Moçambique and to which Lusa had access today, BNI – which is on the central bank’s list of institutions with less than a thousand clients – closed that period with a non-performing loan (NPL) ratio of 52.4 per cent (43.98 per cent in the previous quarter) and an NPL coverage ratio that fell to 69.29 per cent.
The 15 or so commercial banks on the central bank’s list are followed by Ecobank, with an NPL ratio of 33.88 per cent, and Moza Banco, with a ratio of 19.12 per cent.
From the list released by the central bank, based on data provided by the financial institutions themselves, United Bank for Africa (UBA), First National Bank (FNB), Standard Bank and First Capital Bank (FCB) have an NPL ratio lower than the recommended 5%, at 0.84%, 2.62%, 2.66% and 3.98% respectively.
Millennium BIM, one of the country’s largest and led by Portugal’s BCP, saw its non-performing loans ratio fall in the last quarter to 4.53 per cent.
The governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Rogério Lucas Zandamela, previously stated that the Mozambican banking sector is ‘solid and well capitalised’, but warned that non-performing loans remain at high levels.
‘The ratio of non-performing loans remains at relatively high levels,’ he described, pointing out that it stood at 9.1 per cent of the total last September, compared to 9.3 per cent in the same month of the previous year.
‘The national banking sector remains solid and well capitalised, with the solvency ratio standing at 24.0% in September this year [2023], corresponding to 12.0 percentage points above the regulatory minimum,’ Zandamela pointed out, at the end of 2023.
Data from the central bank indicates that 15 commercial banks and 12 microbanks operate in Mozambique, as well as credit cooperatives and savings and credit organisations, among others.
RTP
