Metro Holding Enterprises, Inc.

What it is

Metro Holding Enterprises, Inc. is a share-holding company incorporated under the laws of Panama on 10 December 1990, and it owns 100% of the shares of Metrobank, S.A. and its subsidiaries. Metrobank itself was constituted on 14 May 1991 and began operations in June 1991, operating in Panama under a general banking licence from the Superintendency of Banks, which allows it to conduct banking business both in Panama and internationally.

METH owns 100% of Metrobank, S.A. and its subsidiaries: Metro Leasing, Eurovalores, Financiera Govimar, Corporación Govimar, Metrotrust and Metrofactoring. Its areas of specialisation include private banking, corporate banking, consumer banking and digital banking.

The company operates from its corporate offices in the MetroBank Tower in Punta Pacífica, with branches in the metropolitan area of Panama City, the Colón Free Zone, and the province of Chiriquí. Measured by consolidated assets and net loan portfolio, MetroBank has ranked among the larger Panamanian-owned private banks.

Who owns it

The bank is 100% owned by Metro Holding Enterprises, described as a financial group of Panamanian entrepreneurs with extensive experience in diverse industries. The exact ownership percentages of individual shareholders are not disclosed in publicly available sources; the company has never published a full shareholder register in its exchange filings.

METH registered 35,457 common shares with the Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores for trading on the secondary market — a very small public float that means the stock rarely changes hands. The first trade on the Bolsa de Valores de Panamá occurred on 8 May 2018 at a price of $37.75, with a total volume of 100,250 titles.

Who runs it

The registered contact and representative for Metro Holding Enterprises at the SMV (Panama’s securities regulator) is Ernesto Boyd García de Paredes, also listed as Ernesto A. Boyd García de Paredes.

Eric Cohen Solís is separately named as a contact for Metrofactoring, S.A., one of METH’s subsidiary issuers, also at the MetroBank Tower address.

The board of directors of Metro Holding / MetroBank is composed of ten directors, of whom six are officers. Names and titles of individual board members beyond the registered SMV contacts are not disclosed in available public sources.

The money, in plain words

The most recent fully audited public accounts are for the year ended 31 December 2018 (KPMG-audited, published on the company’s own site). Total interest and commission income was $89.1M; after all costs and taxes, the bank kept $12.85M — a net profit margin of roughly 14.4% (our calculation).

For every dollar of shareholders’ equity in the business, it earned back about 8 cents that year — a return on equity of ~7.9% (our calculation), modest but typical for a conservative community-scale bank.

By December 2023, according to Fitch’s rating report, total operating income reached $65.5M, with consumer loans and mortgages growing to represent nearly 25% of the total portfolio. In May 2024, Fitch upgraded MetroBank’s national long-term rating to ‘A(pan)’ from ‘A-(pan)’, citing better financial performance relative to local peers and a key profitability metric — operating profit as a share of risk-weighted assets — that improved to 1.7% in 2023 from 1.2% in 2022.

Total assets stood at $1.414B at end-2018 (audited); equity was $161.7M, giving a leverage ratio — assets funded by borrowed money versus owners’ capital — of about 8.7 times, standard for a bank of this size. At December 2023, the loan-to-deposit ratio was 83.4%, which compares favourably with local peers.

What it is doing now

MetroBank’s appetite for loan growth is typically conservative, expanding more slowly than the broader Panamanian system, which gives it tight control over its portfolio quality. The bank has been gradually shifting its mix, growing consumer and mortgage lending alongside a strategy of expanding loans to foreign-based clients.

In March 2024, Fitch cut Panama’s sovereign credit rating to ‘BB+’ from ‘BBB-‘, reflecting fiscal pressures worsened by the closure of the country’s largest copper mine. That macro headwind weighs on all Panamanian banks, and MetroBank is no exception, even as its own creditworthiness moved in the opposite direction.

What to watch

• Financial transparency. The last fully audited public accounts date to 2018; more recent figures flow only through third-party sources such as Fitch. Investors should watch whether METH files updated audited statements with LATINEX or the SMV.
• Panama macro. Fitch cut its 2024 Panama GDP growth forecast to 1.5% from 4.5%, a sharp slowdown that will test loan quality across the system.
• Ownership disclosure. The controlling shareholder structure is private and undisclosed; any change in the Boyd or related family group’s holding would be a material event for a stock with this tiny a float.
• Dividend sustainability. With a current yield of 4.57% on a $27.45 share price, the dividend is attractive — but it depends entirely on MetroBank’s earnings, which are not publicly updated on a regular schedule.

This is news, not investment advice.