Arab Bank has asked two US ratings agencies to give it a credit rating, according to industry sources. Unusually, the bank seems likely to be assigned a rating higher than the sovereign ceiling for its home country, Jordan, on the grounds that most of its assets and liabilities are outside the Jordanian market.

Arab Bank's chairman, Abdul-Majeed Shoman, said on 7 January that the rating would help to reduce the bank's funding costs. 'We hope to get A+,' he told Reuters in Amman. However, the sources say this is probably too optimistic and the bank is more likely to get a rating in the BBB range. MEED understands that Arab Bank has approached Standard & Poor's (S&P) and Thomson BankWatch about a rating and retained a US investment bank to advise it. S&P and BankWatch have tended to give higher ratings to Arab banks than Moody's Investors Service, the US agency with the widest Middle East coverage. S&P currently rates Jordan's sovereign credit at BB-.

The bank is not believed to be planning a bond issue in the near future, but wants a rating to raise its international profile. With assets of just under $16,000 million at the end of 1996, Arab Bank is one of the largest banks in the Arab world and the only one, apart from Arab Banking Corporation, that can claim to be active right across the region.