Judith Obaze
In its bid to promote sustainable banking, the Bank Directors’ Association of Nigeria (BDAN) has concluded plans to collaborate with Financial Institutes Training Centre (FITC) and other institutions outside the country in order to reduce capacity gap in the sector.
Speaking at the 22nd annual general meeting (AGM) of BDAN, held recently in Lagos, the President, Mrs. Osaretin Demuren, said they would continue to be an effective forum for representing the interests of bank directors in Nigeria.
She said they would collaborate with regulatory agencies and other stakeholders to ensure the public’s interest are always protected and other efforts targeted at meeting the needs of our members.
“We are going into collaboration with other international training bodies to build capacity, especially for the bank directors and directors in other sectors. We interact over time with other directors from other sectors with some of the things they do that we can bring and share them together.”
“We have also introduced a director feature, we hope, over the course of these editions feature directors (executives and non-executives), to inspire our young readers by giving them a behind-the-scene access to the lives of the directors, and their journey to success,” she said.
Meanwhile, the General Secretary BDAN and Executive Director (ED) Heritage Bank, Dr. Jude Monye said they would bridge the professional gap currently lacking in the banking sector in working with other international institutes that provide trainings and capacity either in Australia, America, UK and middle East.
“This is to bring what make Nigerians leave the country to attend courses, this would help to bring the people here so that a lot of people can be trained, capacity can be built up and the training needed by bank directors and their staffs.”
The ED also urged Nigerians banks to operate within accepted practices to support the real sector of the economy and commended the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on credit monitoring.
“For us, it is a good policy and we welcome if you look at the last quarter there is an increased in credit in the market by the statistics the CBN rolled out on how much the banks have lent out to the real sector. So is a right policy in right direction.
“Once the banks can stick to their best practices in their risk and acceptance criteria to give a loan, and profiling the customers eventually the loan would perform. The monitoring and risk acceptance criteria the bank carried out before they grant a loan are basic things banks should do and CBN is not saying loan the money to anybody you see and the fact that they also prescribing minimum loan to deposit ratio for lending does not mean the bank should be reckless Use your credit policy and then implement all your risk asset criteria for on boarding the borrowing customers,” he said.
