Tunisia - Banking Systems Tunisia - Banking Systems
Tunisia signed a four-year agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in May 2016 that included commitments to enhance the CBT’s independence and to strengthen the effectiveness of monetary policy to ensure greater exchange-rate flexibility. The commitments also include measures to strengthen reserve buffers, facilitate external adjustment, restructure public banks, improve banking resolution and supervision frameworks, develop credit bureaus, and relax caps on lending rates to increase access to finance. To comply with these recommendations, Parliament adopted a new Central Bank Statute in May 2016, as well as laws regarding recapitalization of BH and STB in August 2015. Other recent reforms include mandates for financial stability, consumer protection, and emergency liquidity assistance to insolvent banks, as well as a macro-prudential oversight committee to ensure the banking system’s overall stability.
Despite these reforms, the Tunisian banking system remains fragile. According to the CBT banking supervision report, the overall capital adequacy ratio of the Tunisian banking system, which measures the ratio of banks’ capital to their risk, stood at 11.9% in 2017, over the regulatory requirement of 10%. NPLs rose to 13.9% of total loans by value in 2017.
Public banks are structurally illiquid due to low deposit growth, which increases their recourse to CBT refinancing.
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