For the three months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2014, the First Cit­i­zens Group saw its af­ter tax prof­it in­crease by 1.6 per cent to $177.7 mil­lion.Com­ment­ing on "an­oth­er prof­itable first quar­ter" for the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, ex­ec­u­tive chair­man An­tho­ny Smart said de­spite ris­ing in­fla­tion First Cit­i­zens was able to main­tain ex­pens­es, grow to­tal in­come and achieve an in­crease in op­er­at­ing prof­it by $3.8 mil­lion.

In his re­port, part of the bank's unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change yes­ter­day, Smart said to­tal as­sets ex­ceed­ed $37 bil­lion at the end of the quar­ter."This rep­re­sents growth of 6.2 per cent over the three month pe­ri­od," he said. "Most out­stand­ing were our loan growth of 7.2 per cent ($0.8 bil­lion) and in­vest­ment growth of 10.5 per cent ($1.2 bil­lion) for the pe­ri­od."

Smart added: "The group's first quar­ter per­for­mance was par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy in light of cur­rent mar­ket con­di­tions which con­tin­ue to be marked by high liq­uid­i­ty and low in­ter­est rates."He said the bank is close­ly mon­i­tor­ing de­vel­op­ments and the re­sult­ing im­pact on gov­ern­ment rev­enue and eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty but is con­fi­dent of con­tin­ued growth and prof­itabil­i­ty for fis­cal 2015.