ComBank remains highest-ranked bank in Business Today ‘Top 40’

The Commercial Bank of Ceylon has retained its long-established status as the highest-ranked bank in the ‘Business Today’ ranking of Sri Lanka’s best-performing companies in 2020-21 and is placed third in the overall ranking this year, which for the first time comprises of 40 entities.
This is the 13th consecutive year that theBank has been ranked among the top fivecompanies in the country by Business Today, which assigned Commercial Bank a total score of 33.05 on a scorecard that ranged from 7.35 for the 40thranked company to 37.25 for the company placed first in this latest edition of the ranking, released in December 2021.
Commenting on Commercial Bank’s performance in 2020-21, Business Today noted that under the astute leadership of S. Renganathan, the bank’s Managing Director/Group CEO, the bank scored the highest ever single-year growth in deposits, thereby increasing its total asset base.
The magazine said the bank had reported a profit after tax for the year of Rs.16 billion and recorded the highest-ever single-year deposit growth of Rs.212 billion to end the year with deposits of Rs.1.265 trillion which contributed to increasing its total asset base to Rs.1.736 trillion, a noteworthy increase of 25.15 percent.
Business Today also commended Commercial Bank for supporting the engine of the national economy by prioritising support towards the SME and Micro enterprises sector, observing that the bank emerged as the leading lender for COVID-19 relief amongst private sector banks and initiated two major loan programs for SMEs affected by the pandemic.
According to the Ministry of Finance’s Annual Report for 2020, Commercial Bank lent Rs. 163.98 billion or 21.57 percent of the Rs. 759.7 billion in loans provided to SMEs by 19 institutions, while the 58,584 loans provided by the bank represented 23.82 percent of the total of 245,883 loans granted in the pandemic-impacted year.
“As a domestic systemically important bank, Commercial Bank has been a driving force in partnering and cooperating with national economic development efforts. In the COVID-19 pandemic recovery process, the bank has played a significant role in leading private sector banks to grant working capital loans and provide concessions to affected sectors. 
The bank has implemented programmes under 11 different categories for affected industries and individuals as part of its Finance Support Scheme and extended these relief measures beyond the mandated debt moratorium,” Business Today reported.