The year-on-year inflation rate for December fell slightly to 7.9 per cent, lower by 0.3 percentage points from 8.2 per cent recorded in November 2019. Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, the Government Statistician, who announced this in Accra yesterday said the inflation rate was predominantly driven by food, transportation and housing. “Due to its relative importance in consumption, food is still the...
The Bank of Ghana has been challenged to enforce its regulations without fear or favour in 2020 and beyond to ensure the sector continues on its current path of growth. According to Banking Consultant, Dr. Richmond Atuahene, this will ensure that Ghana’s banking sector becomes one of the best in the West African Sub-region. The clean up of the country’s financial...
The Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) has announced that it has received approval to issue in excess of 39 million ordinary shares to the Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT) to raise GH¢127 million in order to help meet its minimum capital requirement. This is in fulfillment of ADB’s recapitalization of four hundred million cedis required of commercial banks by the Bank of...
The total stock of Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) continues to increase as it hit GH¢7.19 billion in October 2019 from GH¢7.14 billion in October 2018. Despite this increase in the nominal numbers, the central bank believes that higher growth in total loans contributed to a lower NPL ratio of 17.3 per cent from 20.1 for the same comparative period in 2018 The...
The ARB Apex Bank has secured eight million dollars in grant from the World Bank to roll out agency banking operations to expand rural and community banking. The agency banking module is expected to rope in more than 1,000 agents across the country, offering a host of benefits to boost rural and community banks (RCBs) operations. Starting next year, the project...
The country’s banking sector is churning out more profit following the regulator’s decision to introduce a number of reforms to strengthen the sector. The Bank of Ghana’s latest banking sector report revealed that as of October 2019, banks in the country made a total profit of GHS2.83 billion which was a 45.3 percent increase in the figure recorded same period...
THE CENTRAL Bank has reiterated that the benefits of the financial sector clean up far exceeded any harm that may have been caused.Research Director at the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Philip Abradu-Otoo, who spoke on behalf of the Governor of BoG, at a forum organized by the Private Newspaper Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG), recently in Ho, said the...
It has emerged that Crane Currency, a currency and security printing company in the United States of America (USA), printed the newly introduced GH¢200 and GH¢100 banknotes for the country. Information available to the GRAPHIC BUSINESS indicated that Crane Currency, which prides itself as being in the currency business for over 200 years, won the bid from the Bank of...
The Head of the Financial Integrity Office at the Bank of Ghana, George Nkrumah, is urging financial institutions to ensure strict compliance with employee background checks as a way of minimizing fraud perpetuated by employees. “When you are employing, you have to do Know Your Employee (KYE ). Know the person you are recruiting. Make sure you do a verification...
The step by the Government to clean up the financial sector could generate negative reactions at the beginning; but result in confidence in the sector, subsequently, Mr Hakim Ouzzani, the Managing Director of Societe Generale (SG) Ghana has said. The reforms, he said, would strengthen the sector and instill more hope and trust in the public for the sector to...
