The Managing Director of the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), Dr John Kofi Mensah has stated that the Bank will soon introduce means of facilitating agricultural financing for the Ghanaian farmer.
According to Dr. Kofi Mensah, the Bank will roll out several packages which allow farmers to access loan facilities within a day so as to help in the growth of their business.
He indicated that digitization is the game changer in the banking sector and any bank that wishes to survive must go digital.
“We are instituting mechanisms that will ensure that we can quickly process loan requests from people within the agricultural value chain by using a digital system which can allow us to have access to their information and conclude on their requests on time,” he said.
According to Dr. Kofi Mensah bottlenecks of visiting the facilities of farmers as well as conducting due diligence by visiting the sites of loan applicants before taking decisions causes major delays in loan approvals.
“With our digital revolution agenda with the click of a mouse we will download all the necessary information needed with less human actions needed to take quick decisions on loan applications,” he said.
Often, the ADB MD pointed, when people hear of Agricultural Development Bank, the intuition was that it only deals with farmers, stressing “but today we want to show that when we talk about modern day agriculture, we talking about technology and so we want to exhibit our capacity in the electronic arena”.
Speaking at ADB’s ‘Digital Banking Breakfast Summit’, he intimated that his outfit has rolled out three digital products and services, namely – Contact Card and Point-of-Sale (PoS) Devices, Web Acquiring Service and Visa Prepaid Card for the benefit of its customers, saying “our e-business team is also working further to enhance the security features on our app to include facial and finger print features”.
ADB has over the years, Dr Kofi Mensah expressed, invested substantially in its e-business department to ensure that its customers enjoy safe, reliable and convenient digital banking services.
“Our customers can make online payments, purchase airtime, transact mobile money services, check accounts details and even enjoy banking services outside our normal working hours,” he added.
The Head of E-Business for ADB, Mr. Ebo Quayson also mentioned that the electronic banking gives convenience, emphasizing that the time saving and security e-banking brings has improved the industry.
Touching on the high cost of e-banking, he said “there are some charges e-banking brings but it gives customers convenience and saves them time. Any bank that wants to stay ahead of the times will have to stay on top of its electronic banking scheme and that the technology being used by banks are provided by third parties at a fee, but as we get more people subscribing, the charges will go down”.
The benefits of e-banking, Mr Quayson averred, was enormous because ADB uses e-zwich card to pay cocoa farmers, national service allowance, NABCO employees and so on.