MASERU – NEDBANK has seen a significant growth throughout the African continent, the bank’s group managing executive director for Africa, Dr Terence Sibiya, has said.
The continent wide Nedbank performance results for 2022 were announced yesterday.
Dr Sibiya told a press conference yesterday that the bank “delivered an excellent performance, a solid performance as strong revenue growth gave us strong headline earning growth of 20 percent”.
The results were released onto the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Nedbank’s primary listing.
The headline earnings increased to M14 billion, Dr Sibiya said.
“What was quite pleasing also was we’re able to set a record because the total dividend for 2022 was 1 649 cents per share, which was up to 38 percent,” he said.
“That is a record and a highest dividend Nedbank has paid in its history.”
Dr Sibiya said even more pleasing to the shareholders is that yesterday the bank announced M5 billion share buyback or share repurchase scheme that the board has approved.
He said the scheme was going through the final approval processes.
“This means that as we buy more shares from the shelters, they will also receive something over and above the dividend that (we) will be paying out in the weeks to come,” he said.
He said the bank has also been named the number one institution within the banking community on the Net Promoter score or satisfaction, meaning clients it has interfaced with last year rated it a good bank to interact with.
“That means they are more likely to also recommend us as a good bank or a good institution to bandwidth to other people.”
Dr Sibiya said Nedbank has invested heavily on its digital journey “and that’s beginning to bear fruits…as we’ve seen double digital growth in our digital transactions”.
He said it is because of this digital investment that the bank now has about two million customers, “which was a clear record for us”.
He said key to the bank is its environmental, social and governance principles.
“We are heavily focused on our climate journey, our renewable energy positioning in the market (through which the bank) received an AAA rating.”
This rating is the highest among the top five global banks in terms of the MSCI and ESG ratings.
Dr Sibiya said of more interest is that the Nedbank Africa regions business performance once again delivered a solid set of results in that its headline earnings were up by 64 percent, “and for the first time we delivered R975 million to the group”.
Tholoana Lesenya and Alice Samuel