Suivant les problèmes de “bad loans” révélés au grand jour ces derniers mois, Andrew Bainbridge, Group CEO de la SBM, a apporté des éclaircissements hier matin face à la presse sur les mesures prises par la banque. D’emblée, il reconnaît que « we’ve had a few hits this year » et ajoute que « we must learn form our mistakes and make sure we don’t repeat them », avant de se dire satisfait des mesures prises par la suite sur le plan du “risk management”.
Interrogé sur les mesures prises suivant les récents déboires de la banque, il explique : «We took a lot of measures to strenghen not our risk management policy per-se, but our procedures and our execution because risk management is about rigourous execution of what you do. Over the last five months, we have strenghened our credit risk review procedures, we have reviewed our client list and have also proactively sought to exclude certain client categories going forward, as there are certain types of clients we do not want to do business with. We are more selective as there are higher risks industries and so we have lost some clients as a consequence of that. We have proactively asked certain clients to re-bank, which has lost up deposits as well as loans. We have introduced a new ‘integrity due diligence policy’ using a third party supplier. We have also reduced the number of jurisdictions where we will do business. »
Avant de conclure que « risk management has never been more complex than nowadays ». Actuellement, le niveau de créances douteuses au sein de la banque s’élève à environ 7,7%, dit-il, sans donner de précision sur le pourcentage concernant les prêts transfrontaliers en particulier, avouant seulement que « I am not satisfied with the level of cross border non performing loans because we did have this issue with a Dubai client but we are learning from that and taking the right measures ». Il a aussi evoqué la cybercriminalité. « We have done a comprehensive review of our sites to make sure that we don’t have a repeat of what happened in India. »