Bank lending in Saudi Arabia is continuing at a generally brisk pace, the National Commercial Bank said in its “GCC Financial Market Quarterly” released Monday.The report said liquidity conditions supporting this credit expansion remain very benign. However, the growing economic confidence has begun to hit deposit growth somewhat and the annual pace of expansion decelerated to 7.6 percent in May. At this point, credit growth is almost twice as fast.
Private sector credit growth in May reached 13.1 percent YoY while public sector credit rose by as sharp 59.2 percent to a total of SR44.1 billion as of May. Recent months have seen a fairly pronounced pick-up in bank lending to the public sector.
