Moody's rates Bantrab notes Ba3

Moody's Investors Service said it assigned a Ba3 foreign-currency senior debt rating to Bantrab Senior Trust's proposed $150 million of seven-year fixed-rate notes. The issuer is a Cayman Islands-based trust established for the sole purpose of acquiring a 100% participation interest in a senior loan made by Deutsche Bank AG, London Branch to Guatemala's Banco de los Trabajadores (Ba3/stable). The outlook is stable.

The agency said Banco de los Trabajadores' b1 standalone baseline credit assessment reflects the bank's growing franchise and niche focus on consumer lending, particularly payroll-linked lending; relatively stable and granular customer-based deposit funding and low reliance on less stable sources such as short-term bank borrowings and debt.

The key constraints to the standalone ratings are the bank's weak earnings generation and limited business diversification, partly due to its mandate of providing consumer loans at an advantageous cost to workers and partly to its high operating costs related to business expansion, Moody's said.

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