The unprecedented scale of change of the business environment caused by the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, combined with dynamic changes of customers’ behavioural patterns have dramatically increased the challenges that banks face, limited the visibility and increased uncertainty to an exceptional level. As a result, the BM Group decided to extend its 2018-20 strategy by another year and prepare a new one for the years 2022-2024.

The Bank aims to recover like for like operational results affected by the COVID-19 crisis and its direct and indirect consequences within 1.5 to 2 years. This is to be achieved by completion of the current cost streamlining program, introduction of new operational efficiency program as well as an improvement business results through improved pricing and sales increase in core products.

In 2021, the Bank will remain fully focused on operational efficiency through re-engineering of processes, automatization, standardisation and simplification. We intend to further optimise the branch network, continue tight cost control despite higher legal and IT expenses to achieve cost to income ratio of 47% and targeting c40% in the mid-term vs. 49% in 2020.

We are aiming at full digitalization, implementing a proactive migration of customers to digital and exceeding the 80% share of digital clients by the end of 2021.

We intend to keep the pace of customer acquisition based on quality of service and high NPS. In retail we aim to increase the portfolio of active clients, leveraging off the digital acquisition as well as franchise and mini-branch channels. Our aspiration is to increase origination of cash loans by double digits in percentage terms and to increase origination of mortgage loans while at the same time focusing on fee growth. We intend to maximize sales and volumes in investment funds capturing our natural market share 7% in the medium term. In the corporate business we plan to focus on existing exposures and with active approach to new clients in low- and mid-risk sectors to grow portfolio by over PLN1.0 billion including leasing and factoring. In leasing, we plan to return origination to its level from 2019 (PLN3.5 billion) after PLN2.5 billion in 2020. All of the credit growth, in both retail and corporate segments, must be achieved maintaining portfolio cost of risk below 80 bps and with a prudent monitoring on the economic evolution in this Covid-19 environment. We plan to keep the NPE ratio below the 5% threshold (4.9% at YE20).