Kenyan lender Equity Group's Q1 profit surges 67%

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Equity Group, Kenya's biggest lender by customers, on Wednesday posted a 67% jump in its pretax profit for the first quarter to 11.70 billion shillings ($108.69 million), after provisions for bad debts more than halved.

Lenders in the East African nation boosted provisions for defaults in the first quarter of last year, after the onset of the coronavirus crisis forced the central bank to authorise loan restructurings for distressed borrowers.

Those loan restructurings ended earlier this year.

The bank's income from transactions increased by nearly a third to 10.7 billion shillings, Equity Group CEO James Mwangi told an investor briefing.

"This means the bank has bounced back to pre-COVID days," he said.

Staff costs at Equity, which also operates in neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania, dropped by about 800 million shillings from a year earlier, the group said.

($1 = 107.6500 Kenyan shillings)

(Reporting by Omar Mohammed and Duncan Miriri; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Devika Syamnath)