At Friday night’s Country Awards for Achievement dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Macau, we announced Public Bank as the winner of our Best Asian Bank award. This is the third consecutive year the Malaysian bank has won the accolade that is hotly contested by top banks in countries across Asia.
Just as with our other country awards, the achievement refers to the period from June 1, 2011 to May 16, 2012.
“This year it was quite close, but Public Bank once again edged out the competition,” said Lara Wozniak, editor of FinanceAsia.
The Best Asian Bank award is given to the bank that ranks the highest among the 13 banks that have won the Best Bank award in each country. To single out the winner we looked at several metrics: return on assets, return on equity, profit per employee, market cap per employee, fee income revenue, gross non-performing loans as well as net NPLs and net interest margin.
We then overlaid this with Standard & Poor'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 13 shortlisted banks were: City Bank (Bangladesh), China Merchants Bank (China), HDFC Bank (India), Bank Mandiri (Indonesia), Public Bank (Malaysia), Trade Development Bank of Mongolia (Mongolia), Banco de Oro Unibank (Philippines), DBS (Singapore), Hana Bank (South Korea), Commercial Bank of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Chinatrust Commercial Bank (Taiwan), Siam Commercial Bank (Thailand) and Techcombank (Vietnam).
HSBC, which won the Best Bank award for Hong Kong, and Standard Chartered, which won the Best Bank award for Pakistan, were excluded on the basis that they really are global banks.
