Commercial banks in the country will today compete for awards at the 13th Ghana Banking Awards (GBA) slated for the Labadi Beach Hotel.
The awards ceremony, which is under the auspices of Corporate Initiative Ghana (CIG), is in collaboration with the Graphic Business, the financial newspaper in the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL) stable as the official newspaper for the awards and it is on the theme: “Identifying and Rewarding Excellence in the Banking Services Proposition.”
The annual event, instituted in 2001, is expected to attract high profile personalities in the financial services sector, financial analysts, economists, academia, government officials and business leaders.
Award Categories
The banks will vie for 14 categories namely: Customer Care, Advisory Services, Trade Finance, Trade Deal of the Year, Long Term Loan Finance and Household Finance.
The rest are Enterprise Finance; Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing; Product Innovation, Competitive Pricing, Corporate Social Responsibility, Financial Performance, Bank Growth as well as the coveted Bank of the Year.
A special prize, Most Active e-zwich Bank, sponsored by the Ghana Interbank Payment Systems (GHIPS), will be awarded to the bank with the most e-zwich services.
This latest addition is to acknowledge the role banks have been playing in promoting the national biometric card. It is also expected to encourage banks to promote its use in the coming years.
The e-zwich category was jointly decided by CIG and Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement (GhIPSS). It is their hope the award category will generate excitement among banks in offering e-zwich services and significantly increase its patronage as well as the use of cards in general as a form of payment.
How it started
The Ghana Banking Awards started in 2001 with the aim of assessing the financial soundness, competition and service quality of the universal banking sector of the Ghanaian financial system to engender healthy competition within the sector.
Ernst & Young is the event statistician and it brings its globally acclaimed reputation to positively bear on the integrity of the awards process.
State of readiness
The Chairman of the Awards Planning Board, Nana Otuo Acheampong, told the Daily Graphic that the approach and methodology for assessing banks for the various categories had been reviewed over the years to make them more robust and reflect the changing dynamics of the financial services sector, both nationally and globally.
“As part of efforts to maintain the integrity of the whole process, the approach and methodology used for the assessment were first approved by a technical committee whose membership included representatives of the banks,” he said.
There are currently 28 universal banks in Ghana. However, for the 13th GBA, 26 banks which published their financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2013 are being assessed.
Nana Acheampong said the event statistician was also working feverishly to ensure that deserving banks emerge as part of efforts to maintain integrity of the awards.
Post-event
He said there would be a special survey report that would be prepared for each bank to enable them to know what their customers said about them among many other issues.
According to him, the report would also serve as a guide for the banks to up their game into the next awards, while serving their customers better.
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Source: Graphic Online