ANSA Mer­chant Bank Group has earned net op­er­at­ing in­come of $114 mil­lion in the first quar­ter to March 2025, 4.2 per cent low­er than the pri­or year’s com­par­a­tive $119 mil­lion.

The com­pa­ny's unau­dit­ed in­ter­im re­sults for the quar­ter end­ed March 31, 2025 were post­ed yes­ter­day on the T&T Stock Ex­change. ANSA Mer­chant chair­man A. Nor­man Sab­ga not­ed that earn­ings per share de­creased by 37 per cent from $0.46 in 2024 to $0.29 for the three months end­ed March 31, 2025.

He said to­tal as­sets in­creased by 2.6 per cent over the pri­or year end to $10.2 bil­lion, while sat­is­fy­ing all reg­u­la­to­ry cap­i­tal re­quire­ments.

Sab­ga added that the bank­ing seg­ment, com­pris­ing ANSA Mer­chant Bank Ltd, ANSA Mer­chant Bank (Bar­ba­dos) Ltd, ANSA Bank Ltd and ANSA Wealth Man­age­ment Ltd, earned net op­er­at­ing in­come of $68 mil­lion (Q1 2024: $84 mil­lion) and prof­it be­fore tax of $4.6 mil­lion (Q1 2024: $36.1 mil­lion).

He ex­plained that the re­sults were neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by volatil­i­ty in the in­ter­na­tion­al in­vest­ment mar­kets. "Notwith­stand­ing this, the bank­ing seg­ment con­tin­ues to see growth in both our re­tail and mer­chant bank­ing busi­ness­es. We con­tin­ue to fo­cus on in­vest­ing, in­te­grat­ing and stream­lin­ing our busi­ness­es to be more ef­fi­cient to bet­ter serve our cus­tomers in both our re­tail and com­mer­cial bank­ing di­vi­sions," he added.

Re­gard­ing the in­sur­ance seg­ment, com­pris­ing Tatil, Tatil Life, Colfire and Tri­dent, Sab­ga said this earned net op­er­at­ing in­come of $61.3 mil­lion (Q1 2024: $60.0 mil­lion) for the first quar­ter and prof­it be­fore tax­es of $21.6 mil­lion (Q1 2024 $14.6 mil­lion), an im­prove­ment of 48 per cent. This is notwith­stand­ing the rein­sur­ance sub­sidiary (Tatil Re) be­ing af­fect­ed by volatil­i­ty in the in­ter­na­tion­al in­vest­ment mar­kets.

Year-on-year, he said this seg­ment has ex­pe­ri­enced growth in its core busi­ness across both P&C and Life in­sur­ance lines and con­tin­ues to show im­prove­ments in un­der­writ­ing prof­itabil­i­ty in both P&C and life busi­ness­es.

Sab­ga added this im­proved per­for­mance has been achieved notwith­stand­ing the com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­ment of the busi­ness­es to­geth­er with claims in­fla­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the cost of re­place­ment parts in the mo­tor line of busi­ness.