The Commercial International Bank (CIB) — Egypt’s leading private sector bank — was named the Best Bank for SME Banking in Egypt and the Middle East during Euromoney’s 2022 Awards for Excellence.
These prestigious recognitions attest to the CIB’s innovative and unique solutions for small- and medium-sized enterprises (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 the 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 CIB’s Acting CEO of Retail Banking Rashwan Hammady.
“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 centre for SMEs, the CIB’s Business Banking division serves over 70,000 SMEs with annual revenues of up to EGP 200m. In 2021, the division posted an operating profit of EGP 1.88bn — up by 20% y-o-y — with deposits increasing by 41% to reach EGP 41.7bn and assets rising by 93%.
Furthermore, the CIB has recently launched several products and programmes designed for SMEs, including the Relationship-Based Lending product, which helps lenders make financially sensible decisions, as well as the Supply-Chain Financing programme that allows smaller enterprises to seamlessly access funds.
Additionally, the bank’s Business Banking Division launched the Women in Business programme 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 programme that connects the 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 the CIB, the division introduced the CIB’s Green Finance Facility. This product is part of the bank’s continuous efforts towards 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, the 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. It also runs the SME Lending Master — a programme that teaches over 200 branch managers how to engage with SMEs and understand their needs.
