At Friday night’s Country Awards for Achievement dinner, we announced Malaysia’s Public Bank as the winner of our Best Asian Bank award, an accolade it also won in 2010. Just as with the other country awards, the achievement refers to the period from June 1, 2010 to May 16, 2011.
“This isn’t subjective,” said Lara Wozniak, editor of FinanceAsia. “The selection of the winning bank is a highly quantitative one, with each bank scored on a number of key performance metrics. And once again, Public Bank scored the highest of the 11 shortlisted banks.”
The Best Asian Bank award is given to the bank that ranks the highest among the 11 banks that have individually won our Best Bank award for each country. We looked at seven metrics: profits, assets, fee-income revenue, compound annual growth rate of loans, non-performing loan ratio, price-to-book ratio and net interest margin.
We then overlaid this with S&P’s Bank Fundamental Strength rating, which measures a bank’s strength, and graded them accordingly — an A rating got the most points and an E rating the least. The S&P rating got a 25% weighting in the overall score.
At the end of this point scoring system, Public Bank emerged as the Best Asian Bank. The 11 shortlisted banks were: China Construction Bank (China), HDFC Bank (India), Bank Mandiri (Indonesia), Public Bank (Malaysia), Banco de oro Unibank (Philippines), DBS (Singapore), Hana Bank (South Korea), Commercial Bank of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Chinatrust Commercial Bank (Taiwan), Siam Commercial Bank (Thailand) and Techcombank (Vietnam). HSBC (which won the Best Bank award for Hong Kong) is excluded on the basis that it is really a global bank.
The award was collected by Tay Ah Lek, managing director of Public Bank.
