Tejarat’s New CEO Targets Asset Cleanup

EghtesadOnline: The new CEO of Tejarat Bank has announced that the privatized bank’s new policies are aimed at improving its financial statements.

News ID: ۷۸۱۰۱۷

14 January 2018

“Offering new and high quality foreign exchange services and expanding digital banking are our new approach for attracting resources from various types of customers,” Reza Dolatabadi was also quoted as saying by IRNA.

He noted that Tejarat Bank’s specialized foreign exchange branches are ready to provide a wide range of forex services to customers by issuing different types of guarantees, opening letters of credit and exchanging foreign currencies.

Tejarat Bank’s CEO also considered the optimization of excess assets as one of the best solutions for cleaning up financial statements, which will be materialized through the sale of surplus properties, according to Financial Tribune.

“Accelerating the process of selling excess properties is one of our main short-term goals that will boost the bank’s capacities for financing the production sector,” he added.

According to Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian, in line with the government’s plan for lenders to do away with excess assets, more than 150 trillion rials ($3.5 billion) worth of bank properties have been sold during the fiscal 2016-17.

Dolatabadi noted that this has increased the power of banks’ managers in other provinces to speed up the process of shedding surplus properties.

Banks’ excess assets mostly accumulated in the form of real estate during the housing boom of 2011-12, which proved to be a bubble that landed in a long-running recession.

The new chief, who has been promoted from a board member to CEO in the final days of 2017, replacing Mohammad Ebrahim Moqddam, also urged the bank’s top managers to attract stable and high quality resources while avoiding any activity that violates the regulations of the Central Bank of Iran.

“Tejarat Bank completely adheres to CBI’s ceiling on interest rates and will take no action that affects the discipline of monetary market in the country,” he said.

CBI issued a directive in October 2017, which obligated banks and credit institutions to refrain from paying high interests–that went up to 23%–after Sept. 2, and cap their interests on one-year deposits at the previously set 15% while paying a maximum interest of 10% to short-term deposits.

Dolatabadi called for reducing the bank’s ratio of non-performing loans, as it is one of the most important factors preventing banks from financing the production sector.

“We have formed special committees for recovering the bank’s NPLs in order to acquire enough liquidity for allocating loans to real entrepreneurs in the country,” he concluded.