Financial system weak to support industrialisation – expert

Other aspects of the financial system, including investment funds, need attention since the banks cannot single-handedly drive the kind of transformation the new government seeks, Martin Ofori, CEO of Crystal Capital Investment, has said.

The country’s financial industry, he told the B&FT, has been developed in a manner that places emphasis on the banking sector, and that in as much as the banking sector remains an efficient pivot of the financial system, it cannot sustainably support long-term growth.

“Going forward, the status quo is not sufficient to bring the needed transformational agenda that government is envisaging, because we need a lot more investment funds which cannot be got from the banks.

The banks, traditionally, are not cut out for long-term investments, so, we need the investment banking and capital space to develop so that it can rise up to the occasion,” he noted.

It will take specific initiatives, he indicated, to promote an all-inclusive development of the financial industry so that it can support the industrialisation agenda of the country.

“We are not only calling on policy makers, neither are we only talking about institutional arrangements and regulatory framework, but we are calling for a more focused strategy implementation body that will allow what ought to happen, happen for the benefit of the people of this country.

Right now, we have various funds in this country, both public and private, and I believe that it will be very easy to consolidate the financial system just by structuring. I believe that we can leverage these funds for all the district level industrialisation programmes as well as all the development projects that we require as a nation to move forward.

So, my clarion call is that as partners, let us consider what we can do to transform the financial sector,” he said.

“We cannot achieve the milestone that we require, we cannot get the requisite investment spending to create the necessary interrelation with the real sector if the capital market and the investment banking space are left in their current state.”

“We have to look at financial interrelations because right now the banking system can only help us to this point. The government has come up with a stimulus budget indicating their focus on increased production and industrialisation in various sectors. But how can the financial system support this?

The financial system, as it is, cannot drive this transformational agenda. And if nothing is done about it, all that we will see is that people from offshore will come in and dictate that we are investing in A or B,” he said.