Since the beginning of the year, Lebanon's major banks have published their preliminary balance sheet figures, while the Banque du Liban has been gradually releasing aggregate indicators for the sector as a whole. More recently, the central bank also published its macroeconomic report, which contained a further set of data relating to the financial sector's condition. Taken together, these figures now allow for a broad picture of what remains of the banking sector — numbers that will bear directly on the restructuring scenarios still to come.

Deposits and Loans: A Sector Transformed

By the end of 2025, total deposits remaining in the sector had reached $87.2 billion. This figure encompasses pre-October 2019 deposits held in both U.S. dollars and Lebanese pounds, as well as fresh deposits across all currencies. Fresh deposits are funds placed with banks after the onset of the financial crisis and are held under different conditions from legacy accounts. On this basis, the sector has shed 45 percent of the deposits that existed in late 2019 — at the start of the current banking crisis — when total deposits stood at $158.9 billion.

Three factors account for this overall decline in deposit volume, each of which can also be understood as a source of depositor losses during the crisis.

The first is the collapse of the Lebanese pound's exchange rate, which sharply reduced the dollar value of pound-denominated deposits when converted at the prevailing market rate.

The second is the sale of bank checks by depositors — transactions that benefited borrowers who purchased dollar-denominated bank checks at steep discounts in order to settle their debts. At certain points during the crisis, the discount on such purchases exceeded 87 percent of face value, a figure that reflects the peak of market distortion rather than a sustained average.

The third is a series of withdrawals permitted under circulars issued by the Banque du Liban, which began in 2020 with disbursements in Lebanese pounds at well below market exchange rates, before shifting to a dual-currency model combining pounds and dollars, and eventually to dollar-only payments.

Against this backdrop, the parallel contraction in lending becomes easier to understand. The loan portfolio extended to borrowers fell from $49.8 billion in late 2019 to just $5.2 billion by the end of 2025 — a reduction of approximately 90 percent. Over the same period, borrowers progressively settled their outstanding obligations, while banks refrained from extending new credit except within a very narrow margin and to a limited number of clients.

Branch Networks and Banking Reach

These developments have had a visible impact on the scale of banking services available to the public. The number of bank branches fell from 1,058 at the end of 2019 to 633 by 2025, meaning that Lebanese banks have closed more than 40 percent of their operating branches across the country.

The regional breakdown shows consistent contraction across all areas of Lebanon between 2019 and 2025:

Beirut: from 562 to 332 branches

Mount Lebanon: from 211 to 123 branches

North Lebanon: from 109 to 66 branches

South Lebanon: from 109 to 69 branches

Bekaa: from 67 to 43 branches

The decline in branches has been broadly proportional to the contraction in deposit values across all regions. In contrast, the number of ATMs and point-of-sale terminals rose markedly — from 2,595 in 2019 to 3,955 by 2024 — a trend that likely reflects growing reliance on electronic services as a means of reducing the need for branch-based staffing. Notably, approximately half of all these machines and terminals are concentrated in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, pointing both to the concentration of retail banking activity in those areas and to broader patterns of demographic density in and around the capital.

Financial Activity and the Shift to Digital

At the level of financial flows, figures recently published by the Association of Banks in Lebanon show that the total number of checks processed through clearing fell by 38 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. Yet the total value of Lebanese pound-denominated checks through clearing rose by 8.04 percent over the same period. This apparent paradox — rising value despite falling volume — reflects an increase in the average nominal value per check, itself a consequence of the pound's continued depreciation.

The Banque du Liban had previously issued Circular 165, which, effective June 1, 2023, permitted the issuance of checks in Lebanese pounds or fresh U.S. dollars through a clearing mechanism separate from that reserved for pre-October 2019 deposits. The circular was designed to achieve two simultaneous goals: to encourage clients to open new accounts in both currencies, and to reduce the country's dependence on cash transactions while supporting economic recovery.

By March of this year, checks drawn on fresh accounts had reached approximately 38,000 in foreign currency alone, with a combined value of around $3.65 billion — a result that points to measurable recovery in formal banking activity, even as the broader restructuring of the sector remains unresolved.