The Bank once again outperformed its peers in the Saudi market in 2019, gaining significant market share across its range of products and services to deliver a 12% increase in profit and a 13% rise in income year-on-year.

Al Rajhi Bank experienced another successful record year, continuing on its transformative journey whilst delivering superior returns and value for our shareholders, customers and staff – a journey that mirrors the changes being experienced across the Kingdom.

This progress is also a testament to the success of our ABCDE strategy that has guided our development in recent years and brought consistently strong financial and non-financial results, with operating income increasing by 41.75% between 2015 and 2019 and net profit by 42.46% over the same period.

A Year of Accelerating Growth

The Bank once again outperformed its peers in the Saudi market in 2019, gaining significant market share across its range of products and services to deliver a 12% increase in profit and a 13% rise in income year-on-year.

Our mortgage portfolio grew by 63%, reflecting our role in delivering the nation’s vision by supporting more Saudi homeowners than ever before. By centralizing our mortgage function, implementing advances in automation and achieving process improvements that increase daily throughput and efficiency, we were able to offer better services to our customers and expand our market share to 32.9%, from 27.9% last year. We provided SAR 4.9 billion in financing to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs).

Our current accounts grew 6% over 2018, and our distribution network remained the largest and most technically advanced in the nation, comprising 546 branches (including 157 ladies sections/branches), 231 Remittance Centers, 300 Affluent Lounges, 300 automated kiosks and 5,215 ATM machines.

To further accelerate this growth and serve our expanding customer base more effectively, we introduced a number of ‘firsts’ during the year, including extended working hours in our dedicated Corporate Banking service centers during the Ramadan and Eid holidays; FX flexible hedging solutions for our corporate clients in partnership with Treasury group; and a facility to add beneficiaries via their mobile telephone numbers on our mobile banking app.

In the present environment we remain focused on effective balance sheet management, further improving our product mix and driving higher average investment portfolio balances. As a result, we grew non-profit bearing deposits to 93% of the Bank’s total deposits representing in excess of 25% market share. This helped drive our net profit margin which improved by 47 basis points in 2019 to 5.22.

We also played a key role in the successful Aramco IPO in late 2019 and made strong progress in corporate structured finance, winning several high-profile deals while continuing to build our capabilities and reputation in the market.

Being an Employer of Choice

With over 12,000 employees across our footprint, we are proud to be one of the Kingdom’s largest and most significant job providers and have worked hard over the years to become an employer of choice driving performance and profitability by attracting, developing and engaging top talent.

In 2019 we achieved our highest ever employee engagement scores with overall engagement reaching 63%, representing a significant increase since 2015, when our engagement score stood at 27%. This extremely encouraging level of engagement translates into more effective customer service, delivered by employees who are inspired to act in our customers’ best interests.

One improving focus area is professional development, which reflects our commitment to enhancing the knowledge, skills and career opportunities of everyone across the Bank. This continued in 2019 with more than 71,000 days of training and development, including leadership development for senior executives and new programs in technology, security and general management.

Meanwhile, the Saudization of our staff continued in support of the goals of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, reaching 96% in 2019, and our female workforce increased by 14.8% this year to account for 14.8% of the Bank’s employees – a 70% increase since 2015. We also launched a dedicated female graduate development program in 2019.

Employee benefits were also expanded with the addition of a new employee savings scheme to help our people to save for the future by matching their deposits, as well as providing a variety of additional enhanced employee benefits.

Aside from our responsibilities to our employees, the Bank also continues to improve the nature of its interactions with society, local communities and the environment. To this end, we launched our first ever Sustainability Report in 2019, laying the foundation for a long-term journey toward becoming a more sustainable organization and solidifying our position as a sector leader in the Kingdom. During 2019 we doubled the number of volunteering hours as part of 75 social responsibility programs in 22 cities.

Customers at the Center of our Business

We maintained our ongoing focus on delivering superior customer experiences throughout 2019, initiating improvements in services and systems, and becoming the leading bank in the Kingdom in terms of Net Promotor Score (NPS) for the first time – a measure based on customers’ willingness to recommend us to others. This leading rank reflects our 2019 score of 39% – a significant jump from our 14% score in 2018, when we ranked seventh. We also continued to lead in terms of our social media engagement, ranking first on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

We launched our expanded Innovation Center during the year in our new building– a facility that is expanding the level of customer input to both the design and prioritization of new features and products. The invaluable feedback gained from this facility has already supported the process of our conversion to digital banking channels and functionalities for a more seamless customer experience. Having delivered 13 new products during 2019 through an enhanced distribution network.

I am pleased to report that the success of these efforts and initiatives has served to strengthen our reputation in the market and the trust placed in us by our customers, as embodied in the awards presented to the Bank during 2019, including the “Market Leader in Saudi Arabia” and “Best Service in Saudi Arabia” in the area of Cash Management at the Euromoney Awards for Excellence.

Driving Digital Transformation

Al Rajhi Bank achieved major progress in 2019 in our efforts to meet the evolving needs of our customers, becoming the leader in our market and the premier banking brand in the Kingdom, with over five million active digital customers.

Much of our recent progress in this regard is the result of our ongoing digital transformation, which continued to deliver significant mobile and internet banking enhancements during 2019, further expanding our digital footprint. More than half of account openings are now digital and majority of customer transactions are carried out using our digital platforms.

In the past year we captured 26.3% of nationwide point of sale value (from 23.8% last year) via our 106,000+ POS terminals across the Kingdom. We also added 292 self-service kiosks and continued to harness a multitude of technological innovations such as blockchain, fingerprint identification technology and electronic signatures to make banking safer and more convenient for our customers.

Excellence in Execution

Al Rajhi Bank remains committed to ensuring the highest standards across all its activities and functions through our world-class compliance program. Having successfully applied the latest technologies and best practices to optimize both our human and technical capabilities.

Complementing our compliance infrastructure, we are also one of the biggest users of robotics in the Middle East, with state-of-the-art assets including 253 bots processing over 25 thousand transactions per day and vastly improving turnaround times. This has led to a 126% increase in transactions per month between 2015 and 2019, from 101 million to 228 million transaction. We also completed the establishment of our new head office and data center during 2019.

Ideally Positioned for Sustainable Success

In this final message as CEO of Al Rajhi Bank, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Board and our Chairman for their support and guidance, as well as to our customers and investors for their loyalty and commitment to our collective success.

For six decades, the Bank has been propelled to ever greater achievements by inspired leadership teams and dedicated employees. More recently, our ABCDE strategy has served to capitalize on this impressive past and position the Bank for long-term success.

In this regard, I am very proud of our staff and leadership team who have contributed to building what is today a highly successful, customer focused market leader that we can all be very proud of.

As I hand over the leadership of the Bank to Walid Al-Moqbel, a very experienced leader, I am confident the Bank will continue to deliver strong results in 2020 and beyond.