ANSA Mer­chant Bank suf­fered con­sol­i­dat­ed loss­es be­fore tax­es of $39.8 mil­lion  for the first quar­ter end­ed March 31, 2022.

In the com­pa­ny’s  fi­nan­cial re­port for the quar­ter, Chair­man A Nor­man Sab­ga ex­plained the op­er­at­ing re­sults of the ANSA Mer­chant Bank Group for the first quar­ter “were af­fect­ed by non-cash mark to mar­ket loss­es seen in our glob­al in­vest­ment port­fo­lios, giv­en the ef­fects of the war be­tween Rus­sia and Ukraine, wide­spread fears of in­fla­tion and ris­ing in­ter­est rates.”

In the pre­vi­ous year, ANSA Mer­chant Bank had record­ed $61.4 mil­lion in prof­it be­fore tax for the same pe­ri­od.

Sab­ga, how­ev­er, not­ed there were some pos­i­tives.

He said, “To­tal As­sets, how­ev­er, grew by 2 per cent to $9.60 bil­lion in Quar­ter 1 2022 ver­sus $9.38 bil­lion in the same pe­ri­od last year. While all ma­jor in­vest­ment as­set class­es ex­pe­ri­enced down­ward price pres­sure, we are long term in­vestors, and we ex­pect that these in­vest­ment val­u­a­tions will re­cov­er over time when the mar­kets nor­malise. Our core busi­ness­es re­main in a po­si­tion of strength, as a re­sult of our sol­id and grow­ing cus­tomer base, a ro­bust bal­ance sheet and healthy cap­i­tal base.”

He point­ed out the group’s  Bank­ing Seg­ment com­pris­ing ANSA Mer­chant Bank, ANSA Mer­chant Bank (Bar­ba­dos), and our Com­mer­cial Bank, ANSA Bank were head­ed in the right di­rec­tion as “all pro­duced new busi­ness growth and if we ex­clude the im­pact of in­vest­ments, our core prof­its in this seg­ment grew by 35 per cent over pri­or year. Over­all, our Net In­ter­est In­come in­creased by 11 per cent over pri­or year and is a sig­nal of the strength of our core bank­ing busi­ness­es.”

Sab­ga was al­so buoyed by the per­for­mance of the com­pa­ny’s In­sur­ance Seg­ment which in­cludes TATIL and TATIL Life.

He said the com­pa­ny’s in­sur­ance seg­ment “re­mains well cap­i­talised and In­sur­ance rev­enues in­creased in most of our busi­ness lines over the pri­or year. Re­new­al in­come in both our Life and Prop­er­ty & Ca­su­al­ty port­fo­lios con­tin­ues to be very pos­i­tive, and ex­pens­es, al­though mod­er­ate­ly high­er than the pri­or year, are be­ing well man­aged. Our core in­sur­ance re­sults are very en­cour­ag­ing as our mar­kets con­tin­ue to re­turn to nor­mal lev­els of ac­tiv­i­ty.”

He stressed that he ex­pect­ed the com­pa­ny to re­cov­er.

He said, “The swing in per­for­mance in this quar­ter is main­ly due to the neg­a­tive non-cash mark-to-mar­ket ad­just­ments in our in­vest­ments, how­ev­er our port­fo­lios are well-di­ver­si­fied and struc­tured to gen­er­ate long-term re­turns. While in­vest­ment mar­kets are ex­pect­ed to con­tin­ue to re­flect volatil­i­ty dur­ing the year, the strength of our brands and our con­tin­u­ing in­vest­ments in in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy au­gur well for the fu­ture, as we main­tain our fo­cus on build­ing our busi­ness­es and as we con­tin­ue to seek new ex­pan­sion and growth op­por­tu­ni­ties lo­cal­ly and re­gion­al­ly.”