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In its March 13, 2014 issue, Executive Magazine published an article on Retail Banking written by Thomas Schellen .
Mr. George Aouad, Head of Retail Banking at Bank of Beirut described 2013 as being an excellent year in retail lending, stressed that the Bank follows a very conservative lending policy and introduced Smart Banking at Bank of Beirut.The following 3 paragraphs are extracts of the article:

For slightly larger peer Bank of Beirut (BoB), 2013 was also an “excellent year” in retail lending and similar in growth to 2011 and 2012, says Georges Aouad, the head of retail banking at BoB, adding that the bank’s retail portfolio grew from a very small volume of $30 million in 2005 to around $1 billion at the end of 2013. “The bank’s main driver of business and profits is still the corporate line, but we are growing on the retail side, and our retail banking contributes a share to the bank’s profits that is growing year after year,” he says, adding that the bank’s strong overall performance was reflected in profit growth from $117 million in 2012 to $147 million in 2013.

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“We, as Bank of Beirut, have a very strict and very conservative lending policy, and we don’t look at booking high sales volumes; we are looking at how the money that we are lending today will come back to us, because this money is not ours, it belongs to the depositors,” explains Aouad.

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Smart Branches

New distribution channels are being developed and implemented, including ‘smart branches’ where the customer can interact with an agent by video conference. Bank of Beirut’s Smart Branch in Downtown is the latest example and, according to Aouad, it even facilitates the opening of an account in as little as ten minutes.