Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the market regulator, this year permitted five private banks to go public for raising funds and IPOs of all of them were oversubscribed by 7 to 60 times.

Bank Asia issued 20 lakh IPOs at Tk 100 each to raise Tk 20 crore from capital market. It received Tk 120 crore recording an unprecedented 60 times over-subscription.

Mercantile Bank's offer was oversubscribed by 36 times raising Tk 780 crore against its IPO of Tk 21.31 crore. The bank offered 21,31,900 shares at Tk 100 each from its total 31,97,650 shares worth Tk 31.97 crore.

Mutual Trust Bank got Tk 106.4 crore subscription against its IPO offer worth Tk 12.5 crore registering 8.51 times over-subscription while investors came up with Tk 33.04 crore for One Bank IPOs against its offer of Tk 19.7 crore.

Standard Bank received Tk 153.8 crore subscription against its IPO offer worth Tk 22 crore posting about seven times over-subscription.

A total of 11 companies made their debut on the capital market this year and mainly the banks received good response. Five other companies received minimum subscription while IPO of a company experienced under-subscription.

Among the non-bank companies only the IPO of First Lease, a leasing company, received noteworthy response with 17.97 times over-subscription.

Agni Systems posted 5.03 times over-subscription for its IPO offer of Tk 3 crore while Keya Detergent saw two times over-subscription for its IPO offer of Tk 3.6 crore.

ICB AMCL Mutual IPO was oversubscribed by 1.7 times while Jago Corporation received slightly higher than its offer of Tk 2 crore.

On the other hand, subscription against IPOs of Khaza Mosaic was under-subscribed. The company received only Tk 40 lakh subscription against its Tk 1 crore offer.

About this trend of over-subscription against bank IPOs, an SEC official said as banks are performing well investors think that it is safe to invest in banks.

"Almost all of the 31 private commercial banks have sound economic health and they are holding annual general meetings and giving dividends regularly. So, investors feel that investment in banks is profitable," he said.

The SEC officials said investment in banks is less risky as there are two regulatory bodies -- SEC and Bangladesh Bank --to oversee the activities of banks.

One capital market analyst said as investment in banks are sure to get returns, many other banks and companies and institutional investors participated in IPO offer which result in huge over-subscription, he said.

"This is an encouraging sign that there will be no shortage of fund for profit-making companies," he added.