Euromoney names CIB Middle East’s best bank for SMEs 2022

31 / 08 / 2022

By Marwa Nassar - -

Commercial International Bank (CIB), Egypt’s leading private sector bank, was named Best Bank for SME Banking in Egypt as well as Middle East’s in Euromoney’s Awards for Excellence 2022.

This prestigious recognition attests to CIB’s innovative and unique solutions for SMEs that have significantly transformed customer experience and cemented the Bank’s position as a bank of choice for SMEs and a leader in the Egyptian market.

These awards are the latest in an extensive list of accolades that CIB has received for its impressive financial performance and successful business model, which focuses on offering SMEs, corporates and individuals a wide range of bespoke and efficient banking products and services to meet their needs.

“The ability to build and execute a strategy that balances risk and reward is the biggest challenge facing SME banking in emerging markets,” said Rashwan Hammady, CIB’s Acting CEO Retail Banking. “Using advanced analytics for revenue management, granular customer segmentation, as well as proactive data-based risk models, has been the true differentiation for CIB’s SME business strategy. Another critical success factor is the culture we have across functions that fosters innovation while having clear accountabilities for each individual,” he added.

Through a network of 250 experienced relationship managers and a dedicated contact center for SMEs, CIB’s Business Banking division serves over 70,000 SMEs with annual revenues up to EGP 200 million. In 2021, the division posted an operating profit of EGP 1.88 billion, up 20% y-o-y, with deposits increasing by 41% to reach EGP 41.7 billion and assets rising by 93%.

CIB has recently launched several products and programs designed for SMEs, including the Relationship-Based lending product, which helps lenders make financially sensible decisions, as well as the supply-chain financing program that allows smaller enterprises to seamlessly access funds.

In addition, the Bank’s Business Banking division launched the Women in Business Program to support the needs of women-led SMEs, the CIB Growth Segment for small-scale businesses to access a bundle of financial services usually available only to larger corporates, and the CIB Business Solutions Program that connects CIB’s SME clients with professional services firms to educate them on a range of non-financial services.

Since sustainability is a core value at CIB, the division introduced CIB’s Green Finance Facility. This product is part of the Bank’s continuous efforts toward greening its portfolio and is considered an initial step toward delivering a full value proposition to the Bank’s customers.

The division also formulated and implemented the best-in-class risk management infrastructure, which is built on a robust, proactive and data-based risk management framework, to support SME asset growth. Guided by this infrastructure, the Bank’s Data Analytics Team created an early warning system that triggers an alert when a customer underperforms or threatens to fall into delinquency.

Additionally, CIB runs the SME Academy, an internal college that educates relationship managers about the financial stresses and complexities of starting and running a small business; the SME Lending Master, a program that teaches over 200 branch managers how to engage with SMEs and understand their needs.