I am pleased with the bank’s robust performance in 2022, a year in which we registered notable progress in enabling the aspirations of our various stakeholders, including customers, shareholders, staff, government, and the community in which we live and work.
We manifested our purpose of driving Uganda’s growth through partnerships and our own efforts, in ways that directly and indirectly benefited millions of Ugandans and supported the country’s post-pandemic economic recovery.
Without diluting the severity of the emerging global and local challenges to our economy, we would like to celebrate the success stories of our customers registered in 2022, most of which are sustained dividends from our Covid-19 interventions implemented between 2020 and 2021.
The bank can confidently report that these efforts paid off for customers. For instance, in 2022, the value of restructured loans—as a result of the pandemic, considerably reduced from UGX197 billion to UGX 14.5 billion, while bad loans in the same pool docked at UGX 26billion.
As a result of the economic recovery of our customers, we saw a 9.8 per cent growth in demand for new credit in 2022 with the volume of disbursed loans increasing to 77,819 worth UGX 4.0 trillion from 63,639 approved applications worth UGX 3.7 trillion disbursed in 2021.
Stanbic Uganda also continued to progress on its stated objective of providing meaningful employment opportunities for Ugandans; we hired more talent, increasing our headcount from 1756 employees to 1907.
We also assigned ourselves a new target on diversity and inclusion where in the medium term we seek to have 10- per cent of our total workforce constituted of people living with a disability.
This new target is inspired by our success in gender equality which was recognised and rewarded in 2022 with the Gold Gender Equality Seal by the United Nations Development Programme in partnership with the Private Sector Foundation.
We drove financial inclusion, reaching over 2 million Ugandans through SACCOs
We are also pleased to report that in 2022, we continued to invest in financial inclusion efforts that contributed to a 30 per cent increase in the volume of transactions, as compared to 2021.
In addition, our customer base grew to over a million clients. This growth was enabled by a combination of strategic partnerships, innovations in account/wallet (Flexipay) opening and product calibration.
A partnership worthy of mention is with the government’s Operation Wealth Creation and other development partners where notable success is noted in enabling access to our credit and capacity building through Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCO). We currently bank over 6100 SACCOs with a combined membership of nearly 2 million Ugandans across the country.
These SACCOs have accessed affordable credit through our multi-stakeholder Economic Enterprise Restart Fund (EERF) to the tune of UGX 40 billion at interest rates as low as 10 per cent per annum for those involved in the agricultural space.
To ensure that these SACCOs serve their members efficiently and effectively, we continued to invest in their digitisation and building strong governance structures that enable transparency and accountability.
Further to our financial inclusion work, we launched Stanbic4Her in 2022, aimed at supporting women-led businesses by extending business management training, networking opportunities, market linkages, and access to affordable credit.
aBi announces UGX 67 billion investment to boost climate-smart agriculture in UgandaWith support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), we managed to close 2022 with over 18,500 women trained in the fundamentals of bookkeeping, tax reporting, and accounting, giving them the confidence to run their businesses.
It gives us great pleasure to also report that over 11,000 small businesses have opened accounts with us in the past year and that over 1,800 of them have already benefited from access to affordable credit at rates as low as 15.5 per cent.
We paid UGX 272 billion in tax and collected UGX 7.5trn more on behalf of the government
We acknowledge that driving Uganda’s growth requires supporting the government’s efforts to mobilise tax revenues to access the resources required to invest in key development projects and enable service delivery.
In 2022, Stanbic paid a total of UGX 272 billion in taxes, making us the biggest taxpayer in the country’s banking sector. We are also pleased to have used the bank’s countrywide branch and agent banking network, as well as digital self-service channels to facilitate Ugandan taxpayers.
Stanbic Bank remitted UGX 7.5 trillion shillings to Uganda’s revenue authority in 2022, representing 33 per cent of total remittances to the government by the entire banking industry.
Lending being Stanbic Bank’s primary business, we acknowledge that credit is the lifeblood of the economy which effectively helps to drive Uganda’s growth that is why our credit is intentionally directed to sectors that have the highest potential to drive economic activity.
The provision of credit facilities is critical to enabling growth through investment. Accordingly, we are pleased to share that Agriculture is still among the top five recipient sectors of Stanbic Bank Uganda’s financing in 2022, accounting for UGX437bn, and this is in line with the country’s key drivers of the economy. The other top recipients of our credit last year are household/consumer lending accounting for UGX1.04 trillion, trade at UGX663 billion, real estate at UGX 573 billion and transport/telecommunications at UGX 417 billion.
Looking forward
Going forward, we would like to acknowledge the emerging challenges in the local and international operating environment which could potentially slow down the pace of growth we registered in 2022.
Our objective, in the coming year and beyond, will be to sustain the pace of our growth by strengthening our operating risk management capabilities and improving operational efficiency and remaining focused on solutioning for the customer to unlock growth opportunities for them.
We remain committed to driving sustainable shared value that is equitable and inclusive achieving this requires a firm focus on financial inclusion, which involves ensuring that as many people as possible have access to financial services.
We shall achieve this aspiration through our platforms including—FlexiPay, SACCO financing, Stanbic for Her, OneFarm, and MediProtect programmes which are designed to drive socioeconomic transformation for traditionally excluded groups.