Only 200 microfinance firms have licenses

XYZ BUSINESS has learnt that only about 200 of the more than 550 microfinance companies operating in the country have licenses.

The Bank of Ghana has therefore been advised to intensify its surveillance activities and crack the whip on the institutions that do not have licenses.

This follows the recent liquidity challenges faced by some of these companies.

The latest is DG Capital in Osu whose offices have not been opened since last week.

Executive Director of the Osei Tutu The Second Center for Excellency and Research, Nana Otuo Acheampong tells XYZ BUSINESS the number of microfinance institutions is making it difficult for the Bank of Ghana to regulate the sector well.

“Where you have about over 550 microfinance institutions of which some 200 of them have licenses it is too huge for the Bank of Ghana to regulate directly. What the Central Bank is doing now is to use the apex bank in the case of rural banks we have the ARB Apex Bank which does the regulation under the supervision of the BoG. The same way the BoG is doing using the Microfinance Association to regulate microfinance institutions.”

Nana Otuo Acheampong explained that many of the microfinance institutions do not have capacity to undertake banking services.