Lasco Financial triples first quarter profit
Published:Wednesday | August 11, 2021 | 12:05 AM
Lasco Financial Services Limited, or LasFin, grew earnings by 171 per cent to $74 million for the first quarter ending June, a performance it attributed to continuous growth in money services and incremental improvement in its microfinance arm.
But revenue growth has been far less robust, advancing only five per cent to $561 million.
Last June, LasFin closed the quarter with losses of $105 million, the majority of which was associated with impaired loans that subsidiary Lasco Microfinnce Limited has been grappling with since the advent of the COVID-19 crisis.
But now LasFin Managing Director Jacinth Hall-Tracey says the overall performance of the microfinance unit is now in line with company targets and growth expectations.
Still, she has a “cautiously optimistic” outlook about the prospects of the group as a whole, while advising shareholders in a statement appended to the earnings report that the company is working to ensure that strategies put in place to grow earnings are supported by investments in technology.
PRIORITISE SPENDING
In addition, the company is looking to prioritise spending in areas that it expects will generate revenue.
“In the upcoming quarters, the company will be focused on areas of the business where we can benefit from more efficiencies and therefore drive costs down. We will also continue to invest in those areas which drive current revenues or will be key in driving future revenues,” Hall-Tracey said.
Since the start of the year, LasFin has been pumping resources into the roll-out of a prepaid visa card issued by Lasco Pay in a deal it recently inked with Visa International.
The Visa card complements the company’s Lasco Biz initiative, which sees Lasco Financial acting as a merchant aggregator or a super merchant to a banking institution to facilitate online sales for small business operators with or without a bank account.
LasFin itself closed the June quarter with cash of $1.2 billion, accounting for nearly a third of its $3.9 billion in total assets.