Unity Bank Plc has achieved full compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in line with regulatory requirements.

The standards were adopted in the preparation of the bank's 2012 first quarter unaudited accounts just submitted to The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), the bank said in a statement yesterday.

The IFRS are a set of internationally applicable accounting standards designed to make financial statements from different jurisdictions uniform and comparable. Nigerian banks and quoted companies are required to migrate to IFRS reporting effective January 1, 2012.

In its first quarter financial statements, the Unity Bank Plc declared a Profit Before Tax (PBT) of N2.3 billion as against a forecast of N1.6 billion earlier released to the NSE.

This represents an annualized PBT of N9.2 billion compared to the N7.1 billion for the full year to December 2011 based on IFRS, the statement said.

The bank also grew its balance sheet by 2% as shown in its 2012 first quarter results.

Customers' continued and growing confidence in the brand is manifest in the growth in customer's deposits from N266 billion at the end of 2011 to N271 billion as at March 31, 2012. Loans and advances grew from N121 billion to N145 billion within the same period representing 20% growth.