At last night's Country Awards for Achievement dinner, we announced Malaysia's Public Bank as the winner of our Best Asian Bank award. Like the other country awards, the achievement refers to the period from June 1, 2009 to May 17, 2010.
"The Best Asian Bank honours the bank that stood out among the best of Asia's top banks," said Lara Wozniak, editor of FinanceAsia. "The selection of the winning bank is a highly quantitative one, with each bank scored on a number of key performance metrics. Public Bank scored the highest of the 11 shortlisted banks."
The Best Asian Bank award is given to the bank that ranks the highest among the 11 banks that have individually won our Best Bank award for each country. We ranked the banks by a series of metrics and also by their scores in Standard & Poor's Bank Fundamental Strength Ratings. The metrics used include: return on assets, return on equity, profit per employee, total assets, percentage of net income derived from fee business, gross NPL ratio, the compound annual growth rate, price-to-book ratio and net interest margin.
The best-ranked bank for each metric got 11 points and the lowest-ranked got 1 point.
We then overlaid this with S&P's Bank Fundamental Strength rating, which measures a bank's strength, and graded them accordingly -- an A rating got the most points and an E rating the least. The S&P rating got a 25% weighting in the overall score.
At the end of this point scoring system, Public Bank emerged as the Best Asian Bank. The 11 shortlisted banks were: China Construction Bank (China), HDFC Bank (India), Bank Mandiri (Indonesia), Public Bank (Malaysia), Banco de oro Unibank (Philippines), DBS (Singapore), Shinhan Bank (South Korea), Commercial Bank of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Chinatrust Commercial Bank (Taiwan), Kasikornbank (Thailand) and Asia Commercial Bank (Vietnam). HSBC (which won the Best Bank award for Hong Kong) is excluded on the basis that it is really a global bank.
Public Bank's award was collected by Chong Yam Kiang, an executive director and alternate chief executive, who attended the awards dinner. Earlier in the evening he also accepted the award for Best Malaysian Bank.
