Good lending services see boost in profit: Fleming

THE Bank South Pacific has reported a profit of K185 million in its third quarter operations this year.
Bank South Pacific chief executive Robin Fleming gave an update on the quarter while accrediting results to several initiatives undertaken by the bank.
“I think good lending across all countries have contributed. Our retail growth has been quite strong and positive in PNG. As I mentioned with housing and personal loans, we have been able to maintain our cost to income ratio at close to 42 per cent risk-weighted capital adequacy ratio of close to 23 per cent.
“We paid our interim dividend last week at 32 toea per share which is a yield of 11.7 per cent.
“Our electronic banking investments continue, such as our new cards and new chip cards for all our Visa and MasterCard customers to give them additional security and additional capability to use internet payment and transactional capacity without having to come into the branch network.
“We can continue to invest in our new banking system which we are hoping to roll out towards the end of 2018 or early 2019.”
Fleming said the new Visa debit cards should be available to customers by next month.
“Part of our approach to electronic banking has been to give people more access to universal scheme card or debit card,” he said.
“BSP is in the process of launching its new Visa cards.
“There are zero costs to the purchase of this cards.”