By JUDITH NAMUTOWE –
THE Bank of Zambia (BoZ) has called on financial institutions to scale up efforts by ensuring that the informal sector have access to financial services to enable them start up businesses.
Meanwhile, AB Bank has so far, disbursed 32 agriculture loans amounting to K320,700 in the new product line.
BoZ director bank supervision department Gladys Chongo Mposha said more needs to be done to ensure that people in the informal sector can also have access to capital.
Ms Mposha said this during the AB Bank’s client appreciation event in Lusaka last week.
She said this would take a great deal of creativity and commitment to innovation to ensure the needs of diverse groups were met and the risks associated with serving those groups were met.
Ms Mposha challenged financial institutions to ask themselves as to what role they could play or what more they could do to increase the level of financial inclusion in the communities they operate.
“I pose this challenge because as major players in the financial intermediation, banks and financial institutions have a significant role to play in driving forward Zambia’s financial inclusion agenda for poverty alleviation,” she said.
She said BoZ expects banks to adopt minimum standards of a good customer service and fair treatment of customers and further expects banks to help customers fully understand the features, benefits, risks and costs of their products and services.
AB Bank chief operations officer Jessica Schicks said the bank recently launched its most recent product, a new service extending agricultural loans to small holder farmers.
She said, with the bank recently having exceeded 10,000 outstanding loans, 60,000 accounts and K40 million in deposits, the management team of the bank emphasised that it was keeping up strong growth plans.