Banque du Caire – A Favourite Bank for Multinationals in Egypt

Interview with Ayman Mokhtar, GM & Head of Corporate Banking of Banque du Caire

In terms of corporate banking, what are the major challenges that you are facing at the moment?

Corporate banking is considered the fastest-growing portfolios in the whole country. The portfolio was acquired in 2008 by Banque Swiss, so we have a very clean portfolio since we’ve started. It is not only fast growing, but growing all over the region, because we didn’t stop after the Revolution, we were very aggressive in terms of lending. The challenge for us was covering the whole segment of customers, which we did. We have revisited our organization several times, now we have corporate banking sitting on several segments: personal business loans, SMEs, mid-caps and large corporations, and multinational division, which is a new division. Now, you can see that Banque du Caire has acquired a lot of multinational accounts over the last three years; we became one of their favorite banks, and I think this gives us additional value: being attractive to corporate clients, which was not there before. We also have a very diversified industry portfolio, and have classified the specialization into industries (hydrocarbon, tourism, aviation, petroleum, electricity, etc.).

We have most of the automotive, electronic, and pharmaceutical industry players in the market, and it’s not their local agencies, but the mother companies that are dealing with us. I think we have acquired a good portion of the multinational segment in the last few years. The challenges are to keep building on the organization and trying to get more talented staff. We already hired juniors last year and have enrolled them in credit courses, and will continue to do so (building the future for juniors and acquiring good people). Whenever the portfolio becomes bigger, you don’t want to lose the momentum in the level of service or relationships – we’re not just selling corporates, but cross-selling other products and implementing the ‘coverage concept’ (i.e. coverage between corporate and retail) even if the account is within the corporate side. That is the challenge that we keep running into, providing the same level of service that we have been providing in previous years.

Were people used to the idea of talking to Banque du Caire for multinationals?

People were not used to this initially; we have only been dealing with this over the last 1-2 years. We have been approaching and approached by multinationals, so it coming from both ways. We’re comfortable because we know what level of service and activity we are providing, but we had to fine-tune this into a specialized division for multinationals. The other thing that we’re focusing on are SMEs; we are one of the market leaders and market players into the syndicated loans and structured finance. I believe that through the corporate structure is how we became one of the competitive banks in Egypt.

What are you planning next in terms of development?

The sky is the limit for us, in continued building. It is a challenge balancing the portfolio between non-performing loans and performing loans. Thankfully, we have a low delinquency rate and minimal non-performing loans, and we have an outstanding portfolio that is balanced and well priced.

Do you feel that Egypt has a good educational system that allows companies and banks to recruit good professionals?

When talking about the private sector, in terms of education, then yes – we have very good universities in Egypt and have met good people. There is a challenge of payment, because the perception of any graduate is very high because their education is expensive. Whenever you offer a payment, they look for something higher. So that’s the challenge you’re facing between getting good people and offering the salaries you want.

What is your perspective of the future or long-term vision? How would you like to develop your area?

We’re still working on the concentration of corporate banking. Staffing is concentrated in Cairo as a head office, but we overlook customers all over Egypt, but not with the same sense that we’re covering from Cairo. I believe that in two years’ time, we will be putting some teams in different cities within Egypt whenever the portfolio or customer base are bigger. I believe that somehow we should decentralize the decision in some other cities. We have customers and coverage all over Egypt, but not the concentration we would like to have. For the human resources and recruitment potential, it was not that easy to recruit, as I mentioned, we recruited a team of 20 and we made it hard for ourselves because of our selective process, but we needed to pick the right people for the right place.