First­Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al Ltd record­ed net in­come of US$25.6 mil­lion for the sec­ond quar­ter of the year, up by US$9.2 mil­lion or 56 per cent over the ad­just­ed net in­come for the first quar­ter.

In its lat­est con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change, the bank al­so re­leased re­sults for the six month end­ed April 30 which show net in­come of US$52.2 mil­lion. This was an in­crease of 62 per cent or US$20.4 mil­lion from the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year when the ad­just­ed net in­come was US$31.8 mil­lion.

In his re­view of First­Caribbean's fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, CEO Rik Parkhill said there was a de­crease in to­tal rev­enue, which was down US$7.7 mil­lion year over year pri­mar­i­ly due to low­er loan and se­cu­ri­ty earn­ings as sev­er­al coun­tries had ex­pe­ri­enced low cred­it de­mand.He said: "Op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es were down by US$2 mil­lion com­pared with the same pe­ri­od last year as we con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from ex­pense con­trol ini­tia­tives and sav­ings from our on­go­ing re­struc­tur­ing pro­gramme.

"Loan loss im­pair­ment ex­pense was down sig­nif­i­cant­ly by US$27.1 mil­lion com­pared with the pri­or year's ad­just­ed ex­pense due to an im­prove­ment in the loss ex­pe­ri­ence."This al­so rep­re­sents the fourth con­sec­u­tive quar­ter of re­duced loan loss lev­els year over year. Loan qual­i­ty is strong and con­tin­ues to im­prove with non-pro­duc­tive loan bal­ances down five per cent quar­ter over quar­ter. Pro­duc­tive loans are up slight­ly over the first quar­ter."

Parkhill said the banks Tier 1 and to­tal cap­i­tal ra­tios re­main strong at 21 per cent and 22.2 per cent, "well in ex­cess of ap­plic­a­ble reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments."