Skye Bank Plc has raised a total of $150m tier-2 capital as part of the measures to beef up its equity and working capital.
Additional tier 2 capital is expected to be raised by the end of July this year.
A statement by the bank quoted its Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer-Designate, Mr. Timothy Oguntayo, as saying this in Lagos during the bank’s pre-Annual General Meeting press briefing.
He said the capital raising exercise was in tandem with the approval the shareholders of the bank gave to the board at the last AGM.
He further said the new capital would strengthen the bank as an institution.
The Skye Bank boss said the bank would use its enhanced strength to further intervene in funding critical sectors of the economy to bring about national development.
Specifically, he said the bank had been supporting the oil and gas industry, real estate, agriculture, educational institutions, among others.
Oguntayo put the bank’s total funding of agriculture at over N15bn traversing cocoa processing, animal production, among others.
He, however, called for the revamping of the Nigeria Agricultural Insurance Corporation to be able to guarantee agric loans in a manner that would encourage banks to increase its funding for the sector more.
On strategies to lower the bank’s cost of funds, he said it had designed new retail banking strategies that would aid the mobilisation of cheap deposit, pointing out that the financial inclusion scheme gave opportunity to banks to do this.
Meanwhile, Skye Bank recorded a profit before tax of N17.136bn for the financial year ended December 31,2013, representing an increase of 3.79 per cent over the N16.510bn recorded during the corresponding period in 2012.
According to the International Financial Reporting System’s compliant result submitted to the Nigeria Stock Exchange recently, the bank’s profit after tax rose to N16.023bn, compared with N12.644bn posted in the previous year , showing an improvement of 26.7 per cent.
Source; Punch
