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Bank of Montreal's Business Lending Surges to 54% of Loan Book

Bank of Montreal's Business Lending Surges to 54% of Loan Book

(Bloomberg) -- For Bank of Montreal, business lending is where the action is, rather than mortgages, credit cards or consumer loans.

Growth in loans to business and government outstripped consumer lending in the second half of the last fiscal year, a trend that continued in the fiscal first quarter. Bank of Montreal saw a 22 percent jump in commercial loans, compared with a 2.8 percent increase from consumer lending. The Toronto-based lender now has C$229.3 billion ($173.5 billion) of business and government loans, representing 54 percent of its overall loan book.

That helped Canada’s fourth-largest lender by assets post quarterly earnings that beat analysts’ expectations.

Key Insights

  • Bank of Montreal’s reliance on business is outsized compared with its peers. TD Securities analyst Mario Mendonca said in a Feb. 15 report that Bank of Montreal’s exposure to Canadian business loans accounts for more than 30 percent of its domestic loans, compared with 21 percent for the big Canadian banks.
  • Elsewhere at Bank of Montreal, earnings declined in two of the four main operating divisions: capital markets and wealth management. Canadian banking, Bank of Montreal’s biggest business, posted profit that was little changed amid a slowdown in the nation’s mortgage market.
  • At the bank’s U.S. retail banking division, earnings rose 43 percent to a record C$444 million. After margins shrank for some of last year, lending is getting more profitable at that unit: in the first quarter, U.S. margins were 3.71 percent, up from 3.7 percent a year ago and 3.69 percent in the fourth quarter.

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  • First-quarter net income rose 55 percent to C$1.51 billion, or C$2.28 a share, from C$973 million, or C$1.43, a year earlier, Bank of Montreal said Tuesday in a statement. Adjusted per-share earnings totaled C$2.32, beating the C$2.24 estimate of 11 analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
  • Bank of Montreal shares had fallen 0.3 percent in the 12 months through Monday, compared with the 0.5 percent decline in Canada’s eight-company S&P/TSX Commercial Banks index.
  • Read more about Bank of Montreal’s quarterly results here.

To contact the reporter on this story: Doug Alexander in Toronto at dalexander3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, ;David Scanlan at dscanlan@bloomberg.net, Daniel Taub, Keith Campbell

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