Sima Kamil, Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), presided over the Agricultural Credit Advisory Committee’s (ACAC) Quarterly Follow-up Meeting in Karachi on Wednesday.
The meeting examined progress on major decisions made by ACAC at its most recent meeting in December 2021, as well as the performance of farm credit in the months of July to April (FY22).
The conference evaluated the findings of the SBP’s newly established Agriculture Credit Scoring Model, which is used to assess the performance of banks, and took stock of the model’s results up to March 2022.
Habib Bank Limited (HBL) rated first among major banks with a score of 63.7 out of 100, followed by Bank of Punjab with a score of 65.2, Meezan Bank with a score of 42.4, the highest among Islamic banks, and HBL Microfinance Bank with a score of 73.4.
The delegates were informed that all agriculture-lending banks’ performance scorecards will be published yearly on SBP’s website.
Kamil praised banks for disbursing Rs. 1,059 billion in farm loan during July-April (FY22), which is 63 percent of the year’s objective of Rs. 1.7 trillion. She expressed worry, however, over the relatively poor performance in terms of farm loan disbursement, which fell by 1.4 percent year on year to Rs. 1,074 billion, which she ascribed to a slowdown in the performance of certain big commercial and specialized banks.
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