Sign Maryland Banking Notice To Quit Simple

Industry sign banking maryland notice to quit simple

[Music] victoria asante is a household name in the banking sector despite starting his career in the first movement consumer goods space he soon made a name in the banking sector working from universal merchant bank standard chartered bank and now first bank of nigeria we are here in his office to understand what it is to be a bank md when a pandemic is happening what his bank is doing to ensure that it mitigates the impact on both customers and in a bank and then what he makes of the central bank's policies regarding the pandemic mr assante welcome to bangkong mo thank you very much yeah you you you are one year into your appointment here how has it been oh it's been a very interesting journey um fantastic um as you may know um fbn is a social first bank of nigeria it's a bank with a huge heritage 126 years of banking and therefore very well known at least in nigeria and other countries so as you can expect there's so much knowledge and so much depth and so on so um my role has basically been to to continue the journey of ensuring that the the bank is well anchored in ghana since it's a fairly late entrance one of the most recent markets that it entered the group entered so it's it's been a very exciting journey trying to navigate the the ghana nigeria corridor and and also as well as getting to know and to become close to a very big and good crop of ghanaian up-and-coming talents and so on so it's been busy very busy you talk about the ghana nigeria corridor we return to that but one year into your your your appointment a pandemic is happening has it interfered with your vision with your plan for the bank absolutely it has like no other i mean we're expecting that quite a number of things we had we are ruled out and so on um we're also physical so it meant that we had to adapt very quickly so pretty much we had to touch everything that we were thinking um when we started a year i think remember we started um with a work thanksgiving as usual we had worked we had planned what i would do my year we had gone for usual the usual kick-starting of strategy meetings and discussions and then we were rolling our plans and then and kobe 19 happened so everything had to change so yes it did affect a lot of things which aspect of the business which aspect of your plan has been interfered with well to start with uh you know kobe is very different because it could it it could take lives and and that that was dramatic i mean anybody who is in a business that will tell you that you always face challenges but there's never anything like if you're not careful you die so that that was a game changer so we needed to be sure everybody was safe staff customers everybody was completely safe it wasn't something you could you could delete ally with you couldn't make mistakes you couldn't take chances and you had to immediately stop the music literally to try and ensure that everybody was safe so that was the first thing and to ensure that everybody receive meant that we had to understand the protocols we had to understand implement without delay all the things that were recommended change the way we branch change the way clients come in made sure our staff understood what their responsibilities were spend quickly on areas where i'm going to spend on talking about leadership one of the challenges that this pandemic is bringing is to test the fortitude of leaders when it comes to the banking sector how how should mds respond oh i i think uh it's it's not just banking any md at all or to respond by first making sure they saved the lives of employees and customers and then of course you go to the business of making sure your business survives because at the end of the if your business didn't survive the era you won't come back to anything so first things first make sure everybody was safe and then make sure the business was safe and it's usually first principles um i mean profit is revenue minus cost so if you are making sure business is safe all you have to do is to make sure either your cost was contained if your revenue was not coming or your revenue was still assured and therefore once you take costs out of revenue you still have something to to to show for it or even with nothing at all try and break even steer above water so it was in terms of the business outcomes it is still first principles but in terms of the on the the unusual the extraordinary um requirement to lead people differently people who were scared for their own existence was different and nothing prepares you for that i mean pandemics come once every 100 years so business schools simulations all the preparation we've had for decades trying to prepare for positions would not tell you that there will be a day where this will come about what it knows that it will tell you that sometimes you have unknown unknowns i mean and this was a typical example of an unknown unknown way you didn't have immediate references to do at all this measures cost and some of them mean losing revenue like you talk about the recent length of loan payments and all that averagely how much do you think you lost to it so far um we we are still counting and all i can say is a percentage then we probably if you look at the run rates maybe people shift off maybe 10 20 hardcore uh but the other aspects remember that we had to spend also come see because like i said our costs went up there are things we needed to put in place immediately apart from the revenue we're making first of all our productivity will go down staff couldn't work as productively as they are so 50 percent are probably at home when they are not ready so that will cost us um the the the things we need to put in place also cost us and then we have to give shave some interest uh from some of the offerings where that cost us we're sharing of loans proceeded in costas but it meant that it would delay revenue and so on um of course people couldn't trade and all of a sudden the airports were shots and the albums were silenced and traded had gone down so all of that meant uh um of course of course there were also opportunities a few opportunities that came up and uh for example there were industries that all of a sudden needed to move very quickly like the manufacturing uh basis that uh focused on on things like um sanitizers and so on so opportunities have been created for people suddenly who needed to move in and as a bank again one of our responses was to make sure those that needed to move pharmaceuticals and so on that needed to move quickly uh which were not just because of business reasons but because of health reasons we needed to support them quickly and we did also some of these things this is still banking and more and we are trying to understand how it is managing a bank during a pandemic our guest is mr yao asante victoria assante victoria santi came here from in july last year and he's been trying to put things together and make the bank stronger than it was one of the things that we saw was the bank of ghana intervening to provide a leadership role for for you the institutions irregularities and it introduced a couple of policies one from a a player perspective how effective have they been so so there was a recognition uh by everybody that this was different so it wasn't um it wasn't we weren't worried about what the central bank in fact were in tandem there was a lot of meetings um um with the central bank we put sometimes even the gun association bankers put together uh working groups to come up with ways of doing things and suggested the central bank some of them suggested from central bank and so on so well we're we're on the same page and there were no issues at all so the only some of the things that we needed to agree on was how we recognized non-performing loans and so on because like we say we don't even know when the pan but in fact we don't know when the pandemic is ending we don't know when some people are going to come out of of this and uh we've let's say march the fact we started in march let's say six months down the line we are still here we don't know sometimes as they say last 12 months it could last at six months we don't know yet all we know is that um we now have a slightly better grasp of things and people have calmed down and we can now plan better and so on but to be very honest we still don't know where this will end so it's still working progress so we are continuously working with central bank on the areas we can improve in the areas we need to sharpen to make sure that the impact if at all is minimal so we've so far worked very well uh with central bank and i don't think there have been any major issues at all one of the expectations from the central bank with regards to the policies was to increase liquidity in the system and then ultimately push that into the private sector for the the economy to come up at least quicker than than before but the central bank reports show that even though the liquidity has gone in there it's not going to the private sector rather a chunk of it is going into investment and and all that and that that to an extent is understandable but it kind of defeats the purpose for which the central bank released try to release the liquidity into the system though central bank has been actually monitoring a lot um on where one whether we are releasing liquidity into what we are using it for and and um that that is something they've tracked in uh working very closely with banks so first of all uh it's one thing releasing the liquidity and there's another finding where to put it so there was a lag so even if i wanted to help it from a city car company i needed some time to do it so you won't see it immediately um it will take probably a month for it to come through so some of the things are delayed but i'm sure when the next round of reporting comes you will see that it's shifted and that has happened the liquidity is going back speaking for myself as my bank if you notice um we grew our assets and advances by about 100 over 20 year-on-year if we see our june so it tells you that we have moved aggressively into into giving facilities out and so on so um speaking for myself no we actually deployed quite a bit into into the system and we identified the people who needed funding and we did just that so those that didn't do it i suspect they needed some some lag time and so on but it will start appearing in the next quarter report that we probably have at the end of september yeah i i saw your your advances and it really grew by over 280 percent and i saw that to be kind of a misnomer so to say something that is out of their norm given the circumstance and all that what what one was the drive where are they which areas benefited and and what should we expect in the long run um so we we came from a small base uh which basically meant that we hadn't done as much as we could um but notice that uh we're we're just making sure we're ready so we're doing some internal stuff and once we are done we now could do better than that um so it's just a matter of timing issues trying to understand which areas we could play where our strengths are making sure our systems and so on were ready and then once we did that we were able to start lending you remember we we brought in quite a bit of chunk of money um also in the last two years when we had to change our shareholding and so on in terms of our capital stated capital so it means that we had enough more money to to lend so once you had more money all you needed to do is to plan around where you wanted to deploy it and the ones who are already able to do that that's why our biz has gone up it's a bit of all these things coming together also perhaps also because i've been in the market i know the market i know where um growths are we are focused a little more and try to make sure we grew our niches if you notice we are primarily a medium sized trade bank and therefore what we've had is to add engagements around how we could partner some of our clients to move them and we've done that we expect to continue growing at it's a faster rate in the industry in terms of growing our asset base uh like i said because of where we are coming from and so we will continue to you continue to see this and it's a promise a bit to our clients that will continue to grow within the the other concern is as banks strive to create assets issues of non-performing loans will come in given the circumstance what what measures speaking broadly what measures should banks put in place what measures are you putting in place to ensure that this robust creation of asset doesn't come back to high exactly and it's always the concern of any bank once they are putting so there's an institutional framework where there's already so one of the things you you notice is that the whole entire banking industry is working very hard to try and make sure we the environment enables more growth in assets one of the things for example central bankers now well is the collateral management administration and so on where we now have a way where all banks can go into the collateral registry register realize and so because when people know that when they default will go after these things is very important so that is that is also working well now structuring is very important when it comes because trust is good but control is better a lot of things we've come to realize is that even when you are giving facilities to people you have to make sure you have a hand on the operations in one way or the other so if you take a typical trader i'm not going to you don't just come and say give me 300 million give me one billion and i'm going to bring goods no you don't do that first of all tell me you structure it a little bit more who are you giving it to i give it a person direct when a good scam can i control it so there are all sorts of structures on the way to make sure people do what they say they will do and then once they've done it they come back and pay for because i think there's a bank remember you also have a responsibility to those who put money here to make sure when you give loans out uh they come back for you to give back to the deposit holders and thankfully the with this sanitized system we have now with the improved uh regulatory framework we have now everybody explain how to make sure we do the right things and i think the banking industry is better for it so we are focusing on structured facilities a lot we are focusing on ensuring that this adversary service is very good for our clients we are making sure controls that go from disbursements or the way to repayment is our world war structure such that we don't have defaults that we used to okay the bank of ghana said that it expects the economy to be stronger than it initially forecasts is that what you are seeing based on your interactions with customers and it's absolutely correct so the focus was very da at the beginning where we thought we probably grew 1.5 instead of six and all of that but at half year as you can see and banking performance is always a good indicator of of how the economy is doing and even though banks didn't probably grow at the same rate as they are all the indications were okay in terms of the fact that it was not as bad as we thought it would be uh it's also giving people the chance to pause and strengthen how things are done because sometimes renewal is also good so all these stress six months that we've not been able to you know change the world relentlessly we've also now had to have time to uh build our systems uh invest more in our digital platforms and so on so we are ready here so by the time the world opens up as we expect symbolically we are even opening our airport up and so on tells you that we'll be ready in terms of many other ways that we need to do partner our clients to do so i'm optimistic i think it's not been as bad as we thought it would be thank god for it but we must stay focused we must make sure we don't sleep we must observe the protocols and everybody must must play their part very very diligently to ensure that we come out of it completely okay banks had accumulated a lot of capital through the recapitalization which you alluded to and um it just at the point where they were about to deploy the capital this came in what would e the impact um from what we've seen of harvey it wasn't too bad you know when you have capital you can deploy it in lending you can also uh improve your own capacity to bank better and we all keep talking about the fact that banks need to improve their platforms so i think banks were building we're all building in terms of all uh uh enable and you know fraud issues and all of that were significant so we needed to make sure you were building all these other you know unseen um things even our business continuity plans and so on we're about to enhance it and those are the things that the public doesn't see so right now i've had to invest a lot in bcps that are cyber related that are making sure that what is the next because all of a sudden i know that there's a possibility that i have to evacuate our staff or i can lose only 30 percent here so what do i do in the next day what if it stays with me for 36 more months so that i have to invest in other areas i didn't expect to so the capital has become very handy in making sure we're able to do these things robustly apart from the things that are usually more visible to staff like branches and all of that so we have we have deployed into into into making sure your banks are more robust than they were previously you you are one person who has virtually gone through all the banks all the banks symbolically so from umb which is a local bank then stan chat then i think backless first nation about first national exactly and then you are here so tell me what how's the experience like working with uh let's say a european or an american bank working at a low cap and working with a nigerian bank well it's different and it's the same i don't know you still have to deliver your custom to your clients and banking is banking um the difference will come in maybe management style or approach or strategically out for example umb was straightforward and um yes it was luca and therefore um you you tend to see quite the number of aluca entrepreneurs who play in there stunt chat is most national and i had the privilege of working in other markets like london and botswana so you exposed me to different ways of doing things and you always speak different things first national bank is a south african-owned bank again it's a it was a regional bank that had a strong focus in capital markets and so on and then we have my current bank fbn which is also a regional player more with west africa and so on um i don't know everybody wants a return for for their investment and that's that's a language of everybody it is just that sometimes the approach is different but i i see it's everybody focuses on how to deliver great management and therefore great return to the shoulder and the good money meant to all your staff and so on so yes there are differences but they still management the leadership that takes you through fbn is a midsize bank in in ghana i mean but in nigeria you're a big player are you not playing under your capacity so it's not a capacity issue so um fbn yes it's is probably its largest bank in terms of many money measures in nigeria oldest bank 126 years is a huge institution in in nigeria clearly it's it's its strategy has now changed to now focus on other places so it's now ready to play in ghana and we'll be there we'll have the privilege of seeing some of the things that has made the fbn or first bank in a jforamata that's that size of a bank and how strong it is and you see you've already seen i'm sure you've seen that uh we've changed focus we've shifted um of course and it is one of my mondays to ensure that we move from where we are to be the bank of first choice uh we want to to excel and be a leading bank here and we are on our way and trust me uh we will succeed you have uh do you have targets on when to achieve what maybe um we always have internal targets or guidances around it but remember it's a market place and the market players also will not sit down there are banks that have spent our substantial 21 20 years and i know fmb and so on and i know everybody's striving to go to the top so it's not like i expect other people to just fold the arms and you take markets here you only take market share when you deserve it and therefore we work hard at it and try to be significant players at the shortest possible time but we are not giving ourselves any such uh mondays as make it one year make it twice all we need to do is to make sure year on year we are growing significantly our bottom line is going up in the direction which meets the minimum standards so once we are delivering on that and making sure we are doing it safely and making sure we are keeping the bank very safe which is the most important thing the results will continue in a direction that is right and we get to our journey as we do um but we'll play it fairly and we'll play it competitively and we'll play it very ambitiously let's talk about you i i read that you are an amateur a golfer and you also play scrabble and all that but one of the things that inspires me is your passion for youth development tell me how did you develop that passion how is it going well i guess it's my journey because in stunt chat let me start from my very first employer unilever in liver is very big on talent and therefore i i benefited from it where people took interest in your career and hand held you and corrected you and showed you what you needed to do you're always very green and you're ambitious without having direction and so but you liver is very very particular particularly if they identify as someone who go find and make sure and that stayed with me and i've been very privileged to have people who did that each time i look back i know that very little difference is not it's not basically the aptitude that people have you know is the attitude and therefore which takes them to the attitudes they want to go to so i know that what people miss a lot is mentorship and each time you people are willing to be mentored and guided and so on you see that they go very very strongly in their journey and the people i started with at unilever you can see all of them around becoming ceos in ghana and beyond and so on because once the culture is inculcated and once you have people to hold you you do that so it's always the first thing i do make sure that people are bemented properly and so on it's not just that i also believe uh strongly in giving back and that's why i'm also very very strong with rotary uh i've i've been in a rotary fight quite a long time and we we believe in service above self and when all is done you must also try and give back whether it's your talents what is your resources and give back to society as uh we should do because it's even something that we expect from no matter what religion you are it's something you expect from from uh you're expected to do from time to time so um i like to give a lot of volunteerism and i like to mentor these are the two passionate passions of my life unfortunately the goal doesn't come as much as it used to scab is easier yeah scrabble is easier because scrapbook is this you can even play online so it's used to unwind so almost on a daily basis i'm doing a lot of that these days i've also discovered the passion of walking things covered so um i just realized that uh walking is is a fantastic one because it excises you well without too much involvement in it you don't have to you know you can actually it's a clear head that you can actually work for an hour and basically do your business meetings in your head so so i've discovered that i want to lately but yes i'm very strong on the mentorship and i'm very strong of volunteerism working with good you mentioned something that it's not the aptitude but it's about the attitude you have i want you to speak to the young bankers out there one of the challenges we have as a country is ethics and professionalism in the banking sector meanwhile integrity is the core of bank and giving the the the service they render and we saw that come up prominently when the bank of ghana started a clean-up exercise speak to that young banker tell the person how the person can prioritize integrity ethics and attitude absolutely i mean recently um i actually had a lecture for my alma mater where i spoke a lot about integrity and and spoke about some of the things we need to do around these things and um look um like i said it's it's aptitude gets you in your knowledge will give you your study off but it's is the is the attitude um that will eventually determine your attitude and it's something i really believe in um attitude meaning that striving just keeping to the knitting making sure you are doing the primary things that you need to do as a banker and that's abiding your time and not i think sometimes the generation why you know she said they they want to succeed but they sometimes want to do it too quickly um and so on so that's where the issues come up from like you riley said yeah we had some issues in the bank industry when you see some of the things that that went on it's it's it was a purely uh a breakdown of some of the ethics of banking and so on and um those slight deviation from some of these core core principles of bank which we must return to and it's a job for both um the employer and the employee to make sure we return to these basic things and i i i tell the you that just stick to the your task just make sure you are doing it one day at a time just make sure you are working hard because 99 of the time hard work pays 99 of the time i'd work with shortcuts will always catch up with you so um just buy your time just employ the right attitude to the what you have to do and then eventually sooner than later you see that you rise to the top great hard work peace 99 percent of the time this has been a very good discussion with mr victoria asante victor is the md of first bank of nigeria and we've been trying to understand how it is to manage a bank what banks think of the central bank's position and policies and going forward what we should expect we hope you enjoyed it thank you for watching i am maxwell adam villa