Newsroom|Bigbank earned its biggest profit yet in the first 9 months of the year

Bigbank earned its biggest profit yet in the first 9 months of the year

Bigbank AS earned its biggest profit yet in the first nine months of the year, which amounted to 17.5 million euros and exceeds the first three quarters of the previous year by 2.5 million.

The net profit for Q3 comprised 5.6 million of this and the loan portfolio increased by 11.3 million, i.e. 450.5 million euros, in a quarter.

“The excellent growth means that the bank’s capitalisation is high – equity has increased by 11% and now comprises 134 million euros or more than 25% of total assets,” said the CEO of Bigbank AS Martin Länts. “The Estonian unit played the biggest role in increasing the loan portfolio, as we managed to grow our private loan portfolio considerably and consequently also increased our market share on the home market.”

According to the CEO of the bank, activities in the area of corporate banking were recently launched on the local market. “Focusing on corporate customers helps us increase our volumes in the coming quarters, because this is the area where demand is high and supply is low in the Baltic States – all companies want to grow in order to remain competitive, but lenders are becoming increasingly more conservative,” added Länts.

The assets of Bigbank Group totalled 531 million euros by the end of Q3, having decreased by 3% during the quarter. The Group’s loan portfolio grew by 19.5 million euros in the first 9 months of 2019. The loan portfolio grew the most in Q3 in the Estonian unit, where the growth reached 7.3 million euros.

The Group had 114,000 loan agreements by the end of Q3 and the geographic division of receivables from clients was as follows: Lithuania 30.2%, Latvia 23.0%, Estonia 19.9%, Finland 16.3%, Sweden 9.3%, Spain 1.3%. At the end of Q3 2019 Bigbank had 405 employees: 237 in Estonia, 78 in Latvia, 68 in Lithuania, 15 in Finland, 6 in Sweden and 1 in Spain.Bigbank AS (www.bigbank.ee) is an Estonian-owned special bank which focusses on consumer loans and fixed-term deposits. In addition to its operations in Estonia it has subsidiaries in Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Spain and offers its products as cross-border services in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.