A cooling down in the banking sector

In 2007 commercial banks’ collective net incomes first breached the P1 billion mark. Today, the country’s top bank routinely makes P1 billion in pretax profits every six months.

Banks have grown from the “comfortable duopoly” of Standard Chartered and the former Barclays Bank in the 1950s, to become the country’s most consistently profitable sector, an industry that has ploughed unfazed through the recessions that have dampened the broader economy.