BoG urged to be tough on enforcing banking regulations

A rural banking expert, Mr. Joseph Akossey, has faulted the Bank of Ghana (BoG) for its failure to ensure that banks and specialized deposit-taking institutions (SDIs) fully comply with the banking regulations that require them to display their financial records to the banking public within a specified period of time.

Section 90 of Banks and Specialized Deposit Taking Institutions Act 2016 (Act 930) stipulates that a bank or specialized deposit-taking institutions shall exhibit at each of its branches or agencies in a conspicuous place throughout the year, a copy of the last audited financial statement.

The passage of the Banks and Specialized Deposit-taking Institutions (SDIs) Act 2016, Act 930, was to ensure Specialized Deposit-taking Institutions conform to the stipulated period of submitting accurate returns.

Among others, the Act was expected to address the supervisory and regulatory gaps to enable the Bank of Ghana to superintend financial service providers in the micro-finance businesses, address, bank resolution, ensure financial consumer protection and promotion of innovation and financial inclusion.

Also,it seeks to strengthen licensing procedures, consolidate supervision and cross-border supervision given the growing importance of conglomerates and foreign banks.

But, according to the Head of Proven Trusted Solution, a marketing research firm, it turns out that most of these aforementioned categories of institutions have not been complying with the directive.

Against this backdrop, he said there is the need for the Bank of Ghana to strengthen its supervisory role and enforce this banking regulation.

For instance, the same section of the Act mandates SDIs to publish their audited financial statement on their websites and in at least two daily newspapers of national circulation.

However, he observed that some SDIs do not publish their account and those who publish it do not comply with the directive to use two daily newspapers as stipulated.

 This, he said does not ensure transparency, integrity, and accountability which are pillars of banking.

He emphasized that the Central Bank should do its utmost best to extend the new corporate governance surveillance yet to be implemented to rural banks.

He explained that this will go a long way to improve the corporate governance structure in the rural banking industry,in the absence of which, it has affected the performance of some rural banks.

The Proven Trusted Solutions boss, who made these remarks in an interview during a customer service training workshop for sales executives of the Suma Rural Bank also encouraged RCBs to assign staff with good customer service traits to customer facing positions.

He said:It is worth mentioning that mentioning that not everyone is well suited for a customer facing position. There are people who have the disposition to interact well with people and with good customer service training such ones can excel.

Further, there should be the promotion of good internal customer service culture. Hence, employees should be viewed as external customers who demand better care like external customers.