Tanzania's National Microfinance Bank (NMB) sees its assets growing by up to 30 percent in 2009 from 1.4 trillion shillings ($1.07 billion) last year, its chief executive said on Friday. The bank expects pretax profits similar to last year's 70.9 billion shillings despite the global economic slowdown, which has forced Tanzania to cut its 2009 growth forecast to 5 percent from 7.4 percent a year before.
At the end of June, NMB's assets stood at 1.5 trillion shillings. With 135 branches it is the country's largest bank by branch network, with more than 170 automated teller machines. It is ranked second by assets to CRDB Bank Plc, which had assets worth 1.64 trillion shillings at end June.
"If you look to the asset side ... the figures showed considerable growth ... and I don't see any reason why we cannot continue at that pace, so it will hopefully end in somewhere between 25 and 30 percent growth at the end of this year," CEO Ben Christiaanse told Reuters in an interview.
He said the bank hoped to match its pretax profit performance from last year. "I think in times of this economic crisis, that will be a good performance," he said. NMB introduced mobile banking in late July and it has already attracted more than 64,000 users, Christiaanse said.
The bank expects to open another four or five new branches by the year's end, and for its ATM network to reach 280. Christiaanse said the bank's loan portfolio was robust, with the proportion of bad debt dropping to 5.68 percent of the 593.75 billion shillings lent as of H1 2009.