Debtors & Recovery | |
Debtors & Recovery | |
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Monday, May 17, 2020 06:50 AM / by
Debtors Africa/ Header Image Credit: EcoGraphics
Loan recovery has had a colourful history in
Nigeria. Indeed, resolving the issues of bad bank loans has existed for at
least three decades but the problem became more challenging as bank capital
grew larger and lenders had access to bigger loanable funds. The lending
capacity of banks grew significantly between 2005 and 2010 and between 2010 and
2015. Nevertheless, with bigger lender capacity came larger loan headaches,
with the economy in a recessionary tailspin in 2015 and 2016, NPLs also rose
with banks making larger loan impairment adjustments on their income statements.
By 2018 banks were gearing up for the implementation of new accounting rules by
the International Financial Reporting Council (IFRC) and the new IFRS9
provisions which required banks to take impairment charges from a forward-looking
perspective as against the rear-view approach adopted by the previous
International Accounting Standard (IAS).
Trinity of Credit - Regulation, Bank, Debtor...
Example of How New Impairment Adjustments Affected a Nigerian Bank In 2018
As an
example of how the new impairment calculations under IFRS9 affected financial
service providers in 2018, FBN Holdings, in its FY 2018 Accounts Statement
noted that, "The resultant impact of the transitional
adjustment to IFRS 9 was charged directly to equity during the financial year
resulting in a decline in our loans and advances to customers from N2.0trn in 2017 to N1.7trn in 2018 and a commensurate reduction in our shareholders' funds. Also, due to amendments to the AMCON Act, our statement of financial
position and income statement for the financial years ended 31 December 2016
and 2017 was restated".
In other words, with IFRS9 rules in play from FY 2018, local deposit money institutions have had to slice off part of their outstanding shareholder equity and reduce the size of their current loan books. But this has helped them clean up their statements of financial positions and optimize their operations for stronger and more reliable future earnings. Analysts have argued that FBNH's hefty IFRS9 adjustment of N209.6bn in 2018 alone, has helped the Group reestablish underlying confidence in their lending business. The impairment provisions have depressed the group's earnings but it has also enabled the subsequent financial outlook of the lender to become more credible.
International Financial Reporting Standard 9
("IFRS9") was to make reporting of bad and doubtful loans more of a predictive
routine than a reactive stab at containing crisis; it was to make financial
company's CFOs attentive to risks inherent in their organizations credit
decisions and lure them into cutting back on the previously rampant incidences
of Non-performing Loans ("NPLs"). Nigerian banks started to implement IFRS9 in
2018 with telling effects on both their Profit and Loss statements and their
Statements of Financial Position. A few of the consequences include but were
not limited to the following:
Moving into 2019, most of the banks needed varying
levels of capital injection to improve their Capital Adequacy Ratios (CARs).
Ecobank Nigeria, for example, saw an additional capital injection of $62m in
2018. Indeed, as a result of its IFRS9 adjustments, the bank's CAR fell from
28.8% in 2017 to 13.6% in 2018. The fall in CAR led analysts to anticipate a
further rise in equity or medium to long-term debt funding by 2019; an event
that took place in Q1 when the bank raised a five (5) year Eurobond Issue of
$450m at a coupon rate of 9.75%. Equally notable was that Nigeria's new banking
giant, Access Bank, saw its CAR slump marginally from 20.1% in 2017 to 19.9% in
2018. It close rival Zenith Bank saw its
CAR fall from 27% in 2017 to 25% in 2018. The major oddball was Unity Bank
which had a CAR that rose from -198.1% to -198.6%, Unity Bank's negative CAR reflected its
negative shareholder's fund and its need to either raise fresh equity or go
into a merger with another bank with adequate capacity to absorb the negative
equity position.
In sum, IFRS9 has had two major effects on the
bank's financial positions. First, the day one adjustment has allowed banks to
reduce the size of their bad loan provisioning and improve their operating
incomes before tax. Second, IFRS9 has, nevertheless, taken a bite out of the
shareholder's capital of the different local banks to varying degrees.
International Financial Reporting Standard 9
("IFRS9") hit Nigerian banks with the force of a sledgehammer; the regulation
started to slowly eat away at bank books since January 2018 and then tore up
shareholder value by the financial year ended December 31, 2018. By replacing
the previous reporting standard (IAS39), the new provisioning requirement
became forward-looking; predicting prospective credit challenges and then
making provisions based on expected losses. This is in contrast to the previous
accounting method of making provisions against actual or known loan
problems.
The new accounting rule compelled banks to be
proactive rather than reactive in their loan quality assessments, hence, making
concepts of credit risk containment dynamic rather than static, as they make
provisions for unknown credit risk within predictive frameworks. This has taken
some toll on bank books in 2018 but could have milder consequences in 2019. The
implications of IFRS9 in 2018 have been compelling:
First Bank saw the highest IFRS9 adjustment of slightly over N200bn, followed by GT Bank at roughly N152bn, Union Bank at N133bn, Zenith Bank at N108bn, ETI at N92bn, Access Bank at N81bn and then UBA at N24.5bn. These banks have been termed Systemically Important Banks ("SIBs") by the Central Bank of Nigeria ("CBN"). The banks reviewed were responsible for about 88% of adjustments made the Industry's statement of financial position for FY 2018. A bank not included in the calculations in chart 1 above is Sterling bank which made an IFRS9 adjustment of N9.2bn in FY 2018; this was higher than Unity and Wema Bank but lower than Stanbic IBTC.
Did 2019 repeat 2018's performance? No, not likely, as banks were no longer able to bring day-one adjustments to their books and for this reason lenders saw major impairment charges already reflected in their 2019 results as CFOs made predictive provisions for bad and doubtful loans. A lot, however, depends on the growth in the sizes of bank loan books (against the backdrop of the CBN's loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) of 65%) and the extent to which non-interest transactions as a proportion of total bank earnings continued throughout the year; most banks saw their non-interest incomes as a proportion of total income grow sizably. The rise in non-interest income in 2019 resulted from an increase in trade-related businesses (such as the opening of LCs, APGs and so on) and growth in contingent liabilities in the form of off-balance sheet transactions.
A deep dive into how the provisions of IFRS9
affected each of the banks under review for FY 2018 will give insight into the
likely strengths and vulnerabilities of each bank in particular and the
domestic deposit money banking sector as a whole in 2019.
Related Reports (PDF)
1. Download the Full PDF Report - Debtors Africa, May 13, 2020
2. Executive Summary PDF - Proshare, May 14, 2020
3. AMCON and Financial Services Debt Burden in Nigeria - Aug 17, 2018
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