The annual accounts of the Bank for the year ended December 31, 2010 were approved by the shareholders at the 19th A.G.M. held here on Wednesday. The meeting was chaired by Alauddin Feerasta. Soneri Bank Limited commenced operations in 1992 with a Paid-up Capital of Rs 300 M and now operates with a network of 184 branches in 79 cities of country including Gilgit & Baltistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir.
Out of these six are exclusively Islamic Banking Branches offering Shariah Compliant products to customers. During the year, the Bank handled Trade Finance business of Rs 193 billion; Advances grew to Rs 54.675 billion and deposits ended the year at over Rs 82 billion.
Shareholders Equity of the Bank is Rs 8.928 billion and in order to meet the Minimum Capital Requirement (MCR) of the State Bank of Pakistan, the Board of Directors has approved an issue of Right Shares at a discount of Rs 5.00 per share of face value of Rs 10.00 each. This is subject to necessary Corporate / Regulatory approvals.
For the Bank, the growing branch network, solid products and services and implementation of Core Banking Software Application has led to enhance customer satisfaction. In addition, the Bank has set up a Centralised Operations unit, which will be crucial in improving controls and transferring back office load from the branches. The Bank is also implementing Anti-Money Laundering and Enterprise Risk Management solutions through SAS which is a leading global software for the Basel framework. In order to ensure business continuity to customers, the Bank now has its own Disaster Recovery Site outside of Karachi where the data of mission critical software is replicated on a real-time basis.
In line with it's commitment to increase customer convenience, Soneri Bank has also focused on enhancing it's Alternative Delivery Channels. The expansion of On-Site and Off-Site ATMs continued in 2010, which reached 184.-PR