For the third year in a row, Indonesia’s Bank Central Asia has been named Best Asian Bank by FinanceAsia.
The award was announced on Wednesday night at a dinner to honour winners of FinanceAsia's Country Awards for Achievement.
The award reflects not only BCA's consistently strong performance across a range of metrics but also its embrace of digital innovation.
"We are especially concentrating on digital banking now, because we believe in five to ten years, millennials will dominate the market," said Jahja Setiaatmadja, president director of BCA, at the dinner at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.
Over the past calendar year, BCA saw a milestone when its internet banking exceeded ATM transactions for the first time. Meanwhile, its fintech subsidiary Central Capital Ventura started to invest.
BCA, Indonesia’s largest private sector bank, has been delivering one of Asia’s highest returns on equity and compound growth rate in earnings per share compound over the past decade.
Key to its success is a sound base of low cost funding, which has supported by a solid increase in CASA (ration of deposits in current and savings accounts). With that, the bank managed to launch a competitive mortgage product that offered low loan rates for a relatively long period of time, a feat not many rivals can sustain given their higher funding costs.
FinanceAsia’s Best Asian Bank award is decided by comparing all the award winners from 17 territories across a variety of metrics, BCA beat the competition with best performance on every metric we reviewed – including impressive ROE and EPS compound annual growth rates, 18% and 27% respectively.
