The Ghana Microfinance Institutions Network (GHAMFIN) has organised the maiden edition of the Non-Banks Financial Institutions Awards and Dinner to celebrate some members of the network as a means of enhancing credibility, performance and competition among the institutions.
The award, which was organised under the theme: ‘Enhancing Non-Banks Excellence and Credibility during Disruptive Periods’, is also an attempt to boost the confidence of those performing extraordinarily within their sector and serve as encouragement to the non-performing ones.
Speaking at the event, Chairman of GHAMFIN, Bernard Joe Appiah, stated that the award is also part of efforts by the network to complement the effort of the Bank of Ghana in its plans to ensure sanity within the space.
“We are complementing the effort of the regulator by doing this awards night to separate the wheat from the chaff. In a way, it will let the public know that those receiving the awards are doing better than the others,” he said.
Mr. Appiah indicated that the award will be an eye-opener to some financial institutions on the need for them to improve corporate governance, submit data, improve efficiency and procedures to help them gain recognition by the network.
Executive Director for GHAMFIN, Yaw Gyamfi, explaining the criteria GHAMFIN used in shortlisting to arrive at the final list of awardees, said: “We picked it from different categories. We look at it from the perspective of being a customer-centric institution, being gender-focused, being better in agriculture financing, and also those who are doing well in terms of digitisation.
“So we look at all these angles and then decide which institutions we want to award. So the process we went through was: first, to allow the institutions themselves to nominate for a certain category; and then, we request for certain types of data from them. Once we got the data, we did our own verification by the team to make sure that what you brought to us was the right thing.
“And then, we also needed evidence on the ground. So for instance, if you are financing agriculture, we ask for some districts that you have clients, just to go and see some of the things that you are financing. So we did all those things. And then, we did some mystery shopping to ascertain some of the categories as well.”
Over 60 institutions across the four tiers of the network were awarded from the categories of Financial Institution of the Year, Advisory Services of the Year, Technology Innovation of the Year, Most Customer Centric Institution of the Year, Contribution to Financial Literacy, The Best Microfinance Methodology, Best Sustainable MFI in Agriculture Financing, among others.
Financial Institution of the Year went to University of Ghana Co-operative Credit Union Limited under tier 2, Multitrust Micro-Credit Services Limited under tier 3, with both Gates of Glory Micro-Credit Enterprise, and Phandy Susu Enterprise under tier 4.
