Gold Magazine April - May 2013, Issue 25 | Page 57

BANKING

Realism
Blended
With
Optimism
No change to IBL Bank’s development plans.
By John Vickers, Photograph by Jo Michaelides.

I

t’s probably fair to say that Ghada
Shami Christofides, Manager of the
Limassol-based Cyprus branch of the
Lebanese IBL Bank has seen a lot worse
crises than the one currently facing Cyprus. She came to Cyprus from war-ravaged Lebanon in 1981, having studied
Business Administration at the American University
of Beirut and, after working for an offshore company,
joined BNP Paribas where she held several posts over
a period of 25 years until its closure in 2011. She was
then asked to join IBL which has been operating in
Limassol since 2009, though, as she told Gold, “it

was in 2012 when we really entered the local market
and it’s since then that we have been getting more and
more domestic clients.”
Like most Lebanese banks, IBL Bank (formerly
Intercontinental Bank of Lebanon) wanted to have
a presence in an EU country and the geographical
proximity of Cyprus, in conjunction with the country’s well-known advantages for business, made it the
perfect choice. At present IBL Bank, Limassol, offers
what Christofides calls “the usual services – savings
accounts, term deposit accounts, transfers and on the
credit side, loans, overdrafts, letters of credit, letters of
guarantee, and other commercial services but soon we

the international investment, finance & professional services magazine of cyprus

Gold 57