Eastern Bank PLC. (EBL) has been awarded Bangladesh’s ‘’Bank of the Year 2023”. The accolade was conferred upon EBL by the renowned London-based international financial analysis and intelligence publication, The Banker. EBL became the first local bank to receive the coveted award for the third time 2020, 21 and 23.
EBL was awarded for proving its mettle in the face of serious economic headwinds and market volatility during the past year, developing innovative products and services, modernizing their infrastructure and delivering bottom line results.
Ali Reza Iftekhar, managing director and CEO of Eastern Bank, said, “We are honored to receive the prestigious award which is a testament to our continuous efforts for achieving excellence. This award will inspire us to uphold our values that drive us day in, day out.”
“Despite the challenges of rising default loans, shortfall of provision and capital, and the Covid-19-induced slowdown in Bangladesh’s financial services industry, we remained focused in our essential role in the society to help our customers save, invest, spend, borrow and protect their money with trust and confidence with a passion for service excellence. We are committed to be a partner on Bangladesh’s journey to a trillion-dollar economy by 2041.”
During the year, EBL doubled down on its digital offering with its Skybanking app. This has been expanded with the introduction of the bank’s Skypay e-commerce platform which, to date, has processed eight million transactions and holds an 81% market share in online payments.
The bank also embarked on an infrastructure modernization program, launching Project Rupantor to upgrade its Oracle Flexcube UBS core banking system to version 14.3, which is a real-time online solution supporting multi-currency, multilingual, multi-entity, and multi-instance operations.
