Activities:
General Trend of Bank Activities:
Export Development Bank of Egypt adopts special measures such as excellence and quality in playing its pivotal role. Through its distinguished performance, the bank aims to be one of the remarkable financial centers, thus it does not confine its target to attain maximum profitability only, but also to achieve prosperity.
Since its inception, the Bank has managed to maintain its identity as a commercial and investment bank; rather than a deposit collecting retail commercial bank. The bank has always been eager to support the export sector through financing investment projects pertaining to such sector, which is contrary to the main philosophy of commercial banks that aim at working capital financing for existing projects. In Egypt common practice has shown that most of the development banks have turned to current operations and deposit gathering, acting as mere commercial banks and thus deviating from their authentic target of being investment and development financial institutions.
The bank resorted to opening of new branches and gathering deposits in order to meet its main goal of establishing and boosting a solid export sector. Consequently, the bank persisted on gathering deposits of companies and corporations in order to be a wholesale bank. The bank re-affirmed its geographic presence in export oriented locations like that of Alexandria that was opened in May 1989 and Tenth of Ramadan in September 1989.
With the change of the government monetary policy during the early nineties, and the tendency to develop sources of finance through issuing treasury bills and bonds, and lifting subsidized interest rates by all means, the bank was motivated to establish a network of branches to mobilize financial resources. Accordingly, the network of branches at our bank had increasingly expanded to 21 branches in March 2012.
With the beginning of the financial reform in 2004 following the amendment of Central Bank Law, as well as The Banking Sector and Money Law no. 88/2003, Central Bank reclassified all banks thus giving them full freedom to open new branches and promote several saving. Accordingly, the bank had to rectify all its future plans to include branch expansion policy, as well as the new banking products that concern individuals and corporations.
Developments of Bank's Activities:
Throughout the life of the Bank that exceeds quarter of a century, EDBE witnessed numerous aspect of development, most significant of which were the following ownership:
Regarding ownership structure, the Bank has endeavored to develop the Egyptian capital market through launching new products in order to assume its basic role as an important source of funding. At first, the bank managed to change its articles of association to allow the private sector and the Egyptian family sector to contribute to its capital.
It also aspired to allow its staff to own some shares of its capital part as one kind of propagating the culture of dealing with the capital market and as an incentive to the staff to further foster their loyalty and belonging to the institution in which they work.
On the other hand, the Bank managed to establish companies focusing on export development, thus allowing the staff own some shares of their capital. Such companies realized good gains for the bank when sold e.g. Roto Pack and Techno Pack.
Loans & advances:
It is worth mentioning that the Bank's loans and advances portfolio has experienced several phases of progress throughout the history of the Bank. At the beginning, the bank focused on medium term finance for export projects or those that aim at exports in order to increase the export capacity of the country thus propagating the culture of production for export and not export of surplus products.
In a subsequent phase, the bank expanded to focus on financing the working capital of different sectors of the economy.
The global financial crisis at the end of the twentieth century that hit the banking sector in Egypt left behind it several criticized and troubled debts that had, in turn, its effects on our Bank. Subsequently, our Bank encountered some difficulties as a result of having a high segment of exporters who deal with the external world, thus encountering some problems which, in turn, had its effects on the credit portfolio. Nevertheless, through its efforts and due to its high coverage ratio and credit worthiness, the bank became one of the most reputable high ranking institutions regarding the quality of its loan portfolio.