ANSA Mer­chant Bank Ltd (AM­BL) is poised for sig­nif­i­cant growth giv­en ma­jor ac­qui­si­tions and in­vest­ments in tech­nol­o­gy and peo­ple, chair­man A Nor­man Sab­ga has said.

Sab­ga made the state­ment in the chair­man’s re­port for the group’s abridged fi­nan­cial state­ments for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2022.

Sab­ga al­so stat­ed that AM­BL at­tained an In­vest­ment Grade Rat­ing of Cari­AA with a Sta­ble Out­look from Cari­CRIS last year.

This was the first cred­it rat­ing for the Group and amongst the best cred­it rat­ings in T&T, he stat­ed.

“The bank­ing busi­ness has been in­vest­ing in the fu­ture of bank­ing tech­nol­o­gy and this past year im­ple­ment­ed dig­i­tal ca­pa­bil­i­ties to bet­ter serve our cus­tomers, and launched our first ful­ly dig­i­tal touch point in San Fer­nan­do, with ad­di­tion­al dig­i­tal Bank touch points to fol­low in 2023,” he stat­ed.

Sab­ga said this will be fol­lowed by dig­i­tal bank­ing ap­pli­ca­tions which will be re­leased over the next few months and pro­vide cus­tomers with has­sle-free bank­ing so­lu­tions.

“In our in­sur­ance busi­ness, TATIL, which has one of the strongest bal­ance sheets in the in­sur­ance in­dus­try and is rat­ed A- (Ex­cel­lent) by the in­ter­na­tion­al rat­ing agency, AM Best, com­plet­ed the in­te­gra­tion of the Tri­dent busi­ness (Bar­ba­dos) dur­ing the year and has re­ceived reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval to ac­quire Colfire,” he stat­ed.

“This ac­qui­si­tion is an­tic­i­pat­ed to align the mu­tu­al strengths of these or­gan­i­sa­tions and en­sure that Colfire’s pol­i­cy­hold­ers ben­e­fit from the fi­nan­cial strength of our AM­BL Group,” Sab­ga stat­ed.

Sab­ga stat­ed that AM­BL’s fi­nan­cial re­sults for the year end­ed 31 De­cem­ber 2022, re­flect­ed the on­go­ing glob­al ef­fects of the in­crease in in­ter­est rates dri­ven by the war in Ukraine and per­sis­tent in­fla­tion.

“This re­sult­ed in the record­ing of a con­sol­i­dat­ed loss be­fore tax of $34 mil­lion for the year end­ed 31 De­cem­ber 2022, large­ly dri­ven by non-cash, mark-to-mar­ket val­u­a­tions in our in­vest­ment port­fo­lios, ver­sus a prof­it be­fore tax of $360.2 mil­lion for the same pe­ri­od last year,” he stat­ed.

“Notwith­stand­ing, to­tal as­sets grew by two per cent to $9.6 bil­lion in 2022 ver­sus $9.4 bil­lion in the same pe­ri­od last year as the Bank saw strong growth of over half a bil­lion dol­lars ($0.52 bil­lion).