Despite unusual challenges in 2023, Wholesale Banking (WB) met our annual objectives and continued marching towards our 2021-2025 strategic goals. Our ability to maintain non-performing loans (NPL) at nearly 0% is the fruit of our robust risk management framework and market-leading approach to project financing.
The year also saw us shift gears as we diversified our revenue streams beyond real estate. This strategic move yielded substantial 60% year-on-year (YoY) growth in lending to non-real estate business customers. Similarly, fee income grew a notable 61% YoY. These achievements underscore the Bank's ongoing commitment to achieving balanced, prudent expansion across different customer segments and markets.
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Our ongoing revenue diversification strategy produced strong growth in 2023. Specifically, this included:
Total operating income (TOI) | Growth (YoY) |
---|---|
Utilities | 84% |
Travel and leisure | 28% |
FMCG | 15% |
Automotive | 255% |
Financial services | 23% |
Such strong revenue growth and contribution came from the significantly higher credit provided to customers outside the real estate space:
Credit growth1 (YoY) | |
---|---|
Utilities | 57% |
Travel and leisure | 311% |
FMCG | 14% |
Automotive | 227% |
Financial services | 35% |
1 Quarterly average credit balance during 2022 and 2023.
Our focus on RM capability, investment in state-of-the-art payment, collection and treasury management solutions and leading FX and derivative capability drove strong sector-wide growth in CASA and fee income.
NFI growth (YoY) | 61% |
---|---|
Utilities | 79% |
Travel and leisure | 232% |
FMCG | 12% |
Automotive | 287% |
Financial services | 71% |
CASA balance growth2 (YoY) | 128% |
---|---|
Utilities | 26% |
Travel and leisure | 334% |
FMCG | 3% |
Automotive | 258% |
Financial services | 183% |
2 CASA balance at end of 2023 vs. end of 2022.
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Merging WB with Business Banking to create CIBG has been important to our strategic transformation. Not only will our value chain strategy become a real differentiator, across different sectors, for all our institutional clients but it will also allow us to better serve customers and deepen relationships with them.
Other areas of focus in 2024 include: