Telenor Microfinance Bank reports Rs 18 billion in revenue for FY2019

LAHORE: Telenor Microfinance Bank has reported revenue of PKR 18 billion for the financial year ended December 31, 2019. This was led by an impressive expansion in the branchless banking customer base of the Bank's Easypaisa wallet.

A two-fold increase in Year-Over-Year wallet accounts was witnessed with more than 3 million increase in monthly active users as compared to 2018. During the year 2019, the Bank continued to develop its capacity to become a major player in the digital payments space.

It invested PKR 8 billion towards building a more robust payment and lending platform enabled through technology that will be able to serve millions of individual and small enterprise businesses by giving them access to financial services digitally.

In line with its significant investment towards growth and expansion, Telenor Microfinance Bank reported a net loss of PKR 16.3 billion for the year ended December 31, 2019.

While a major part of the net loss is attributed to investments in expanding the digital payments business, the other contributor is credit impairment loss, for which a provision of PKR 8.9 billion was made by taking into account expected losses and credit irregularities that also include fraud.

M. Mudassar Aqil, President & CEO of Telenor Microfinance Bank said, "2019 has been a remarkable year for us in terms of growth. Despite challenges in our credit business, we are excited about how we have repositioned ourselves to become the leading provider of digital financial services in the country.

We have had an impressive growth in our Easypaisa customer base during the last year serving 6.4 million mobile wallet users in 2019 as compared to 3.3 million in 2018. Similarly, our depositor base grew by 86% to 17.18 million in 2019.-PR

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