EuroBic makes €42.5 million

Portuguese retail bank EuroBic has reported net profits of €42.5 million for 2018 – an improvement on the €25 million registered for 2017.

The increased profits were achieved on the back of an investment portfolio that brought in windfalls of €15.4 million.
In a statement to the markets released on Thursday, EuroBic highlights that last year it succeeded in reducing cost-to-income from 66.5% to 65.7% with “improvements in efficiency to core profitability at 4.9%”.
According to the institution, own-capital ratios (Common Equity Tier 1) stood at 13.1% at the end of 2018 – 13.1% at the end of 2018 – 13.4% after incorporation of income-, which compares to 12.9% in 2017.
“The bank’s total assets were €7.5Bn on 31 December 2018, which represented an increase of €428 million on the previous year (+6..0%), financed essentially by an increase in client resources of around €410 million (+7.7%).
EuroBic also highlights that in 2018 its mortgage portfolio grew over 30% with the bank achieving an “annual share in this credit segment” greater than usual with loans to SME “growing over 10% (around €190 million).
Last year in March the bank was fearful that capital injections into Novo Banco from the Resolution Fund could have set the bank’s profits back by 15-20% stating at the time that it was “an additional tax on top of the normal taxes that we already pay.”
EuroBic also revealed that last year it paid out on perpetual bonds worth €94.5 million that had been issued by the former Banco Português de Negócios in a voluntary early amortisation.
Banco Português de Negócios (Portuguese Bank of Business), or simply BPN, was a Portuguese private bank nationalised by the Government in 2008 after a bad management and malpractice-related debt of €1.8Bn and several irregularities uncovered in the institution. In 2012, BPN, stripped of many of its debts and bad loans, was sold to Angola’s Banco BIC for €40 million.
EuroBic is the private bank founded with Portuguese and Angolan investment with a shareholding structure identical to Banco BIC S.A. (Angola) which partly resulted from that collapse.
The bank has around 200 branches in Portugal, including those branches and the healthy assets of BPN purchased from the Government. Based in Lisbon, the bank is currently headed by Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, a former Finance Minister under the PS socialist government of José Sócrates which fell in 2011 and paved the way for the entry of the Troika in Portugal.