Bladex, Inc. Class E

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bladex's third quarter 2020 conference call on this 27th day of October 2020. This call is being recorded and is for investors and analysts only. If you are a member of the media, you are invited to listen only. Bladex has prepared a PowerPoint presentation to accompany their discussion. It is available through the webcast and on the bank's corporate website at www.bladex.com. Joining us today are Mr. Jorge Salas, Chief Executive Officer at and Mrs. Ana Graciela de Mendez, Chief Financial Officer. Their comments will be based on their earnings release, which was issued earlier today and is available on the corporate website. The following statement is made pursuant to the safe harbor for forward-looking statements described in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In these communications, we may make certain statements that are forward-looking, such as statements regarding Bladix's future results, plans, and anticipated trends in the markets affecting its results and financial condition. These forward-looking statements are Bladix's expectations on the day of the initial broadcast of this conference call, and Bladix does not undertake to update these expectations based on subsequent events or knowledge. Various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are detailed in the bank's press releases and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should any of our underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may differ significantly from results expressed or implied in these communications. And with that, I am pleased to turn the call over to Mr. Salas for his presentation.

Thank you, Nick. And good morning, everyone joining us today to discuss our third quarter results. Today, I'm here with Ana Graciela Hernandez, our CFO, and a few members of my executive team. This morning, I will be going through the presentation and talking about our balance sheet management during the quarter. And then Annie will discuss the P&L implications of it. After Annie's remarks, I'll make some closing comments and then I will open it up for questions. Let me start by saying that overall for the quarter, we're still in a very uncertain environment the underlying business fundamentals of Vlade performed quite well. The unique flexibility of our business model and the quality of our customer base continue to be key. Going to the presentation on slide three, as you probably recall, during the second quarter, our loan portfolio shrank by as much as 16%, close to a billion dollars. While we're in the process of reassessing credit risk, and favoring liquidity during the first few weeks of the storm. So after very solid collections in Q2, we entered the third quarter with a very healthy portfolio, close to $5 billion, mostly short-term, focused on top-tier banks and top-tier corporations. In slide four, you can see that we had over $2 billion in the trade during the third quarter. More than 40% of our portfolio matured during Q3. Again, just like we did in Q2, we collected virtually 100% of all maturities across all industries in all the 18 countries we operated. Moving on to slide five, in Q3, we managed to grow our portfolio by 3%. We continued working closely with our clients and disbursed over $2.2 billion two times the volume this was in the previous quarter. As usual, these were mostly short-term, rate-related loans. The average standard was 108 days, and the average rate was fly-worth plus 227. That is, on average, 32 basis points higher than the maturing loans for the quarter. The resulting loan portfolio for Q3 in slide six was slightly above $5 billion, fully performing with zero NPL. 73% of this portfolio is maturing in less than a year with an average rate that is 14 basis points higher quarter-on-quarter. Slide seven highlights the fact that our credit exposure remains very conservative, both in terms of countries and sectors. 59% of our loan book is now in indefinite-grade countries, And similarly, 55% to 53% of our book is placed in sub-tier financial institutions across the region. You can see in both graphs, the remaining exposure is well diversified among countries and sectors. In slide seven, highlights the fact that our credit exposure remains very conservative, both in terms of countries and sectors. It's worth mentioning that as our portfolio matures, we keep strategically reducing our exposures in high-risk countries like Argentina, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. Likewise, our exposure to riskier sectors has also been declining. As an example, our exposure in the airline industry continues to follow a downward trend since Q1. It has come down by almost $100 million, 67%, and today represents less than 1% of the portfolio. So moving on to slide eight, we show how our asset composition has varied throughout the year.

Our asset mix by quartering is $5 billion, but always making sure we maintain a robust level.