14th banking awards to be launched tomorrow
The 14th Ghana Banking Awards, under the auspices of Corporate Initiative Ghana (CIG), will be launched in Accra tomorrow.
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The launch will, for the first time in the history of the awards, coincide with the final Technical Committee (TC) meeting which comprises representatives of all the universal banks, the event statisticians and the planning board, headed by a renowned banking consultant, Nana Otuo Acheampong.
At the launch, the media will be presented with copies of the final draft of the approach and methodology to be adopted for the assessment to enable them to appraise themselves of how the event is run.
The Chairman of the Awards Planning Board and Chief Host, Nana Acheampong, told the Daily Graphic that inviting the media to witness the TC meeting before the launch “forms part of the continuous efforts by the organisers to make the awards more transparent”.
He said this year’s awards would be highly competitive considering the sterling financial results released by the various players in the industry.
Award categories
Fourteen award categories will be competed for; Customer Care; Advisory Services; Trade finance
; Trade Deal of the Year; Long-term Loan Finance; Household/Retail Finance and Enterprise/Corporate Finance.
The rest are Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing; Product Innovation; Competitive Pricing; Corporate Social Responsibility; Financial Performance; Bank Growth and Bank of the Year.
To underscore the independence of the awards process, Nana Acheampong said, “No universal bank is allowed to provide sponsorship. Instead, non-universal banks and corporate entities offer sponsorship.”
He said the Ghana Banking Awards was one of the most noted and spectacular events in the industry calendar, attracting leading figures from across the Ghana banking community.
“As the largest event of its kind, the awards offer unrivalled branding and sponsorship opportunities, including profiling through advertising and editorial coverage in the event brochure and at the glittering award ceremony itself,” he added.
The process
“Since 2001, CIG has organised the Ghana Banking Awards with the view to identifying and rewarding excellence in the universal banking sector,” Nana Acheampong said.
He explained that the awards were based on both quantitative and qualitative data.
“With the banking regulator’s directive to all banks to make their financial statements public through the press, a rich set of quantitative data is made available for the awards. The quantitative statistics are supplemented with qualitative surveys of both the banks and their customers,” he added.
The chief host said assurances for both data analyses would be provided by a “Big-Four” auditing firm, Ernst & Young, which would bring its globally acclaimed reputation to bear on the integrity of the process.
“The approach and methodology for assessing banks for the various categories are reviewed and agreed by the Technical Committee which is made up of representatives of the banks,” Nana Acheampong said.
