KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has published Quarterly Compendium: Statistics of the Banking System for Jul-Sep, 2021 (Q3CY21).
The Compendium offers a comprehensive data coverage on major financial statistics as well as Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs) of the banking sector. Besides the banks, the Compendium also provides comprehensive statistics of Islamic Banking Institutions (IBIs), Developments Finance Institutions (DFIs) and Microfinance Banks (MFBs).
The data reveals that the banking sector maintained its growth momentum during Q3CY21. The assets of the sector rose by 2.17 percent during the period over last quarter (20.9 percent growth on YoY basis), surpassing 0.44 percent growth attained in corresponding period of the last year.
This expansion has been particularly contributed by the domestic private sector advances, which increased by 3.8 percent during Q3CY21 (16.6 percent increase YoY) against a contraction of 0.5 percent during the corresponding period of the last year. On funding side, deposits increased by 0.36 percent during the quarter as compared to 0.80 percent growth in same period of previous year. On a YoY basis deposits attained an encouraging growth of 16.9 percent.
The increase in advances remained broad based reflecting a general recovery in the economic activity as well as the impact of higher input prices. The healthy growth in credit to the private sector is quite encouraging, as it will prop up the low credit incidence in Pakistan as measured by domestic private credit to GDP ratio.
Moreover, SBP’s refinance schemes announced in the wake of COVID-19, particularly the Temporary Economic Refinance Facility (TERF), has been supporting the private sector credit growth in the last few quarters. However, the banks have increased the credit disbursements from their own sources during Jul-Sep-2021 quarter and the trend continues post quarter.
