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Press Conference on Moody's Assigns Ratings to ACLEDA Bank Plc.

December 20, 2004

As some of you may remember, ACLEDA has very humble beginnings; firstly as a micro-finance NGO from 1993 to 2000, then from 2000 onwards as a bank - starting with a specialised bank license and upgrading to a full commercial license at the end of last year. These years have seen enormous changes in our business and, while we remain strongly focused on microfinance we have been expanding into other banking activities - in some cases, such as deposit taking, with very positive results. At the same time our traditional role as a microcredit provider has also flourished through a rapidly expanding network of 119 offices in 21 provinces today.

Such growth has brought with it many challenges and both the management and board of ACLEDA Bank recognise the need to be extremely vigilant in making sure that the bank's governance structure and balance sheet are robust enough to support this expansion.

An additional consideration is that these developments have brought us into contact with many new counterparties, be they our colleagues in the local banking community, foreign financial institutions and international organisations - many of whom now use our services. Moreover, since the events of September 11^th 2001 , regulators all over the world are imposing tougher standards of transparency and conformity with international agreements on such matters as money laundering. Failure to comply with these can have an enormous impact on our ability to do business with our overseas partners. This is the way the world in which we operate is going and it is our duty to our stakeholders—be they customer, shareholder, regulator or the community at large—to try to the very best of our ability to ensure that ACLEDA at least will meet these standards.

As part of this process the management and board of ACLEDA decided at the beginning of this year that we needed to establish a benchmark against which we could measure ourselves against our peers. A further aim was to enhance our international standing as we were increasingly dealing with foreign counterparties in funding our lending activities, particularly microfinance. This led us to the inevitable conclusion that we should seek a rating from one of the top international credit rating agencies and, after an in-depth series of meetings with prospective candidates, Moody's Investors Services was selected as the best fit. Not only did they meet all the criteria but they showed a particular understanding of our history and the environment in which we operate.