February 2023

Ms. Lubna S. Olayan, Chair of the Board of Directors of Saudi British Bank (‘SABB’), announced the Bank’s financial results for the fiscal year 2022, with profits increasing 52% to SAR 4,872 million and total operating income increasing 26% to SAR 9,697 million for the year.

Ms. Olayan commented “SABB continues to deliver on the promise of the merger, with growth across all businesses, improving digitisation and customer experience as a result of our strategic investment plans, and increased investment in our people who remain our core asset. One hundred percent of our senior management team reporting into the CEO are homegrown, local Saudi talent and over a third of our senior management is female. We continue to be a nurturing environment for talent across the entire employee base – something we are extremely proud of.”

On SABB’s financial performance, Ms. Olayan noted “our financial performance was ahead of plans, and mirrored the strong and resilient performance by the Kingdom and the Saudi economy against a global backdrop of increased uncertainty and geopolitical tensions. Benchmark rates have increased at pace as global economies tackle inflation. Given the construct of our balance sheet with a large proportion that re-prices with 3-month SAIBOR, our revenues have increased significantly, and at the same time we have continued to invest whilst maintaining positive operating efficiency. Throughout the year, asset quality has remained stable. We grew our customer lending portfolio by 9%, revenue by 26%, and profits by 52%, while our return on tangible equity grew 3.7ppts to 11.5%.”

Customer lending has been a strategic focus, with SAR 7,908 million or 6% growth in our corporate business accompanied by SAR 5,785 million or 14% growth in our retail business. Ms. Olayan commented “within our corporate business, we continue to participate in the Vision 2030 giga projects and all the way down the value chain and, more recently, have focused our energies on investing and improving our MSME business. Equally, our retail business has performed extremely well with mortgage originations growing at faster than the market rate.”

SABB’s performance during 2022 has also received external recognition through being awarded Saudi Arabia’s Best Bank 2022 by Global Finance Magazine. Ms. Olayan commented “we were delighted to win this award for the third year running, testament to the hard work of our employees, and the loyalty of our customers.”

Finally, Ms. Olayan added “The Board and I are extremely grateful to the Ministry of Finance, Saudi Central Bank, the Capital Markets Authority, and the other government agencies for their support and direction. As our collaboration with HSBC goes from strength to strength, I am especially grateful to HSBC for their commitment, to SABB, and more importantly to the Kingdom as a whole.”

Summary of results:

• 2022 net profit of SAR 4,872 million was higher than the SAR 3,203 million recorded in 2021, up 52%
• 2022 total operating income of SAR 9,697 million was higher than the SAR 7,678 million recorded in 2021, up 26%
• 2022 net customer advances of SAR 183,132 million were higher than the SAR 167,556 million recorded in 2021, up 9%
• 2022 customer deposits of SAR 214,279 million were higher than the SAR 186,761 million recorded in 2021, up 15%
• 2022 shareholders’ equity of SAR 54,683 million was higher than the SAR 53,029 million recorded in 2021, up 3%