Ghana has too many commercial banks – Akoto Osei
The Minister of Monitoring and Evaluation, Dr Anthony Akoto Osei has expressed concern about the number of commercial banks in Ghana and said they were too many.
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He has therefore suggested the consolidation of smaller banks into bigger ones that are financially robust arguing that for a country like Ghana, with its population, the over 30 commercial banks were too many.
In a radio interview with Accra based Class FM on Tuesday, Dr Akoto Osei said: “too much liberalization has gotten us where we are and you need to have a capacity to supervise them.”
“In all honesty I personally believe that for a country like Ghana we have too many commercial banks who are not capitalized very well. We need a few well capitalized banks to do proper commercial business.”
“It is important to have a good base to do intermediation, banks are supposed to intermediate between savers and consumers but if you get to the point where you see that depositors are not even going to the commercial banks but they are going to rural banks then you know that the banks are not doing a good job, so the banks need to look within and be more competitive.
“It is not enough just to say that I am a commercial bank, you have to have the capital base to be able to do commercial business not small small businesses that may not help you. You need to find where the depositors are and take it to the people who need to do proper business and you can get good returns
He concluded by saying Ghana should take examples from what happened in Nigeria, eventually most of them had to be consolidated and they are doing much better now. “We need to take lessons from there.
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