Page 2 of 8  To begin, I think that it is important to recognise the progress which the financial sector, and especially the banking sector, has made over the last decade. Between the 2005/06 and 2015/16 fiscal years, commercial bank credit to the private sector expanded by more than threefold in real terms, at an average real rate of 12 percent per annum.
Although bank deposits also grew strongly over this period, by two and a half times in real terms, there was a marked rise in bank intermediation, with the ratio of bank loans to bank deposits rising from 53 percent to 70 percent. Secondly, there has been a notable strengthening of competition in banking markets.