The Managing Director of Union Savings and Loans, Philip Oti- Mensah has described the 2015 half year performance of the company as satisfactory.
This is despite the current economic challenges that have rocked the country including macro economic instability, depreciating cedi, high inflation, power crisis among others.
Mr. Oti- Mensah in an interview with Citi Business News said despite the average performance there was the need for staff to put in more effort to achieve the company’s targets.
“I believe that if we do not take care we might face what I call performance elusion in some extent over confidence based on the short term successes and therefore I encourage all staff to not become complacent, to continue fighting and doing well in selling, in customer service, in the speed and quality of service we provide and even more importantly in this era being careful and meticulous with every transaction so that our growth will come with the quality it deserves”.
Union Savings and Loans operating in the banking sector as a “tier 2” Bank, has undergone major restructuring and recapitalization in the last few years.
According to the company, there have been two main challenges they have encountered this year with regards to their assets and liabilities.
“The fact that some of our clients lose their revenue due to the economic downturn mainly because of the depreciation of the Ghana Cedi. For most of our clients, especially those who import directly, they sell in Ghana cedi and when they convert the money back into foreign currency or especially the dollar they lose their capital. This slowed down business or saw customers keep coming for refinancing or restructuring of their loans which then has the tendency to affect our growth”, Oti- Mensah stated.
On the deposit side, the company is lamenting that high inflation coupled with the depreciation of the Ghana Cedi has resulted in clients transferring directly monies to suppliers ahead of the purchases instead of keeping in the country.
As part of the company’s strategy for the second half of the year, Mr . Oti- Mensah said they will stick to, “doing the simple things consistently and every day, so basically we encourage our managers to make sure that customer service, relationship management, phone calls to clients, visit to clients, making sure that the contribution that an officer has to make every day, every month is made. So it actually boils down to a discussion about leadership. So our strategy is basically; encouraging our managers to become better leaders so that they can get their staff to perform. So during the session we spoke about leadership a lot, we looked at leadership videos and we discussed, we believe that our managers have learnt a lot to perform in the 2nd half”.
He said the company set out in 2013 with a new vision to be at the top of the tier 2 banking space by 2015 and by 2017 to become a bank.
“Since we set of, we grew our total assets from just about 15million in 2012, by end of 2014 184 million, and that is about a 12 fold growth. At the same time we increase our deposit base from just about 10 million in 2012 to almost a 100 million in 2014, and that is about a 10 fold increase. We’ve grow our loan portfolio by almost 12 fold. And with these we have indeed not only become a strong brand in the tier 2 banking space but also left to the key figures we are indeed in the top 5.
Despite the short term successes we believe that these first 3 years have largely been a period of building a brand therefore we are not satisfied, we want to achieve more towards vision 2017 as we seek to become a dominant commercial bank,” Mr.Oti-Mensah added.
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By: Rabiu Alhassan/citifmonline.com/Ghana