Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Sco­tia­bank Trinidad and To­ba­go Ltd has re­alised a first-quar­ter ad­just­ed net in­come af­ter tax­a­tion of $156 mil­lion for the quar­ter end­ed Jan­u­ary 31.

This prof­it reg­is­ters an in­crease of $8 mil­lion or six per cent over the ad­just­ed pri­or year com­par­a­tive.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease, the bank said there were two sig­nif­i­cant one-off items im­pact­ing prof­itabil­i­ty. The first was a $22 mil­lion ad­just­ment to in­crease al­lowance for cred­it loss­es aris­ing from a change in as­sump­tions re­lat­ed to how the group as­sess­es eco­nom­ic sce­nar­ios un­der IFRS 9.

A high­er tax ex­pense in 2020 due to a $36 mil­lion tax cred­it record­ed by the in­sur­ance sub­sidiary in the pri­or year, was the sec­ond item.

The group’s to­tal rev­enue in­creased by five per cent which was dri­ven by in­creased loans in the re­tail and cor­po­rate/com­mer­cial seg­ments, cou­pled with strong growth in the com­pa­ny’s in­sur­ance and cred­it card port­fo­lios.

In com­ment­ing on the re­sults, Stephen Bag­narol, SBTT man­ag­ing di­rec­tor said: “Our first-quar­ter re­sults for fis­cal 2020 demon­strate the strength of our di­ver­si­fied port­fo­lio. Our core per­for­mance con­tin­ues to be dri­ven by sol­id growth in our com­mer­cial and re­tail busi­ness lines.”

The com­pa­ny’s To­tal As­sets stood at $27 bil­lion, an in­crease of 10 per cent year over year. The banks loans to cus­tomers grew by $1.6 bil­lion or 10 per cent, while de­posits grew by $2.5 bil­lion or 14 per cent over the pri­or year.

Bag­narol said: “Our re­sults are ev­i­dence that our con­sid­er­able ef­forts to strength­en our busi­ness and pro­vide a su­pe­ri­or cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence are pay­ing off.”

He con­tin­ued: “Sco­tia­bank aims to be the lead­ing bank of the Amer­i­c­as and our com­mit­ment to the Caribbean re­mains strong.”

Bag­narol al­so con­tends that the Bank re­mains stead­fast on its dig­i­tal strat­e­gy, to pro­vide its cus­tomers with more con­ve­nient bank­ing op­tions.

He an­nounced new of­fer­ings aimed at im­prov­ing the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of cus­tomers’ trans­ac­tions.

Bag­narol al­so in­di­cat­ed that the new Sco­tia Mo­bile App will al­so soon be re­leased, which lever­ages the suc­cess­ful App launched re­cent­ly in Cana­da. He said: “Lead­er­ship con­tin­ues to be a pri­or­i­ty and as we evolve our Bank for the fu­ture through the de­vel­op­ment of our em­ploy­ees.”

Ac­cord­ing to Bag­narol Sco­tia­bank has al­so part­nered with LinkedIn Learn­ing to of­fer ca­reer de­vel­op­ment with cu­rat­ed learn­ing paths, ag­ile learn­ing, and user-friend­ly con­tent.