Year in Review

Bank of us marks a historic year

2019/2020 Annual Results

Bank of us marked its 150th anniversary and reached a significant financial milestone of over $1BN in total assets in 2020.

2020 will also be remembered as the year the coronavirus pandemic arrived in Australia.

Bank of us Chief Executive Officer, Paul Ranson said he was proud of the way the Bank’s employees responded to the pandemic and the disruption it has caused.

“Our people have continued to place our customers at the heart of banking and as a result, we have ensured a strong operational resilience and achieved excellent growth, continuing the strong growth momentum from recent years.”

The key results include:

• Maintained record growth in new customers, with total active customers increasing by over 1,000.

• $265M in loan approvals, with market share growing by 15%.

• Total assets grew by 16% to $1.14BN.

• Loan book growth of over 9%, 3 times faster than system growth to $923M

Bank of us Chairman Stephen Brown said despite the challenges faced this year, the growth across the business was strong.

“We saw after-tax profit increase by 21% to $2.8M, which is a sound result in an unprecedented low interest rate environment. This result includes a conservative provision of $827K for potential doubtful debts arising from the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mr Brown.

“We offered loan repayment deferrals to our borrowers experiencing hardship because of COVID-19. Deferrals reached a peak of 4.5% of our loan book but have reduced to 1% at the end of September with expectations that most borrowers will revert to normal repayment arrangements over the next few months. The level of deferrals is significantly less than the industry average of 9%.”

It is uncertain as to how the Tasmanian economy will perform in the short to medium term given the impact of COVID-19 said Mr Ranson.

“As the only Tasmanian customer owned bank, we know things have been tough. We’ve supported Tasmanians for over for 150 years and we will continue to be here for them through these challenging times.”