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Reliance Financial Services Signs Mou With VISACA Apex
[April 17, 2014]

Reliance Financial Services Signs Mou With VISACA Apex


(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Reliance Financial Services, has once again registered another significant development in its drive in ensuring that banking service reaches to the door steps of communities in the country with the recent signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with VISACA Apex.



The signing of this laudable initiative was attended by 15 Visaca Association across the country as well as senior government officials and NGOs.

The MoU between Visaca Apex and Reliance Financial Services will include the following under its scope of activities; training and development of the management and staff of the Visaca Apex and through Visaca Apex also develop the capacities of the Visacas' in areas like strategy and product development, sales and marketing of financial services, principles and practice of good lending, customer service and risk management.


The MOU would also covered areas like the provision of robust information technology platform, development of alternative and additional revenue lines starting with remittances (domestic and International ), marketing, branding and re-positioning of VISACAs with a view to inspire confidence within the communities they operate so as to serve their customers better.

Speaking at a signing ceremony held on Thursday at the Kairaba Beach Hotel, Baboucarr Khan, the managing director of Reliance Financial Service described the move as timely, explaining that the strategic partnership between Reliance more than 70% of The Gambia's population still does not have access to financial services, despite this lack of financial inclusion, these rural economic actors contribute approximately 30% of the country's gross domestic Product (GDP) through agriculture.

The government of The Gambia, he added, has always been cognizance of this reality adding that it was against this background that the great initiative of creating the village savings and credit associations (VISACA) business model was developed and implemented across the country, as a grassroots financial inclusion initiative under the auspices of the Rural Finance and Community Initiative Project supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and the International Fund for Development (IFAD).

He thus pointed out that VISACAs' has registered some successes; however, there are a significant numbers that are yet to achieve financial and operational self-sufficiency and be in a position to achieve scale and fulfill their mandate of providing rural financial services.

Khan maintained that the challenges faced by VISACAs' are numerous and among them includes; a sound corporate governance, ability to attract and retain competent management and staff, strategic and product development capability, access to stable and low cost funding, information technology platform to enable the processing of transactions real time and to aid efficiency and reduce operational risk.

It is against this background that the respective executives of the VISACA Apex and Reliance Financial Services had engaged over several meetings culminating into this great signing ceremony, adding that his bank is very proud to be associated with VISACA Apex.

The strategic partnership, he went on, will start with a pilot program with 15 VISACAs' out of the total of 80 VISACAs' presently in the country, pointing out that it is projected that all VISACAs' would be integrated into the partnership program by the year 2018 in line with the strategic blueprint developed by the V-Apex.

Deputizing for the governor of Central Bank of The Gambia, Bai Senghore, the director of microfinance at the Central Bank emphasized that the objective of this partnership between the two institutions is to promote and deepen financial inclusion at the grassroots level by specifically targeting the life cycle needs of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) while describing it as 'extremely laudable'.

He pointed out that it is highly critical that efforts to deepen financial inclusion must focus on building capacities at both the demand and supply side of microfinance, maintaining that this current initiative to build the capacity of VISACAs will not only improve financing of small businesses at the grassroots level, but capacity building of the VISACAs by all means will facilitate the oversight task of the banks as well.

Alhagie Mohammed Lamin Sawaneh, the general manager of VISACA Apex recalled that VISACAs were first established in the country 30 years ago, adding that they were built on the philosophy of self-help, self-management and self-sustainability.

He stated that VISACA as a village financial institution belongs to the village so as to address some of the challenges. He informed that the VISACA Apex was formed in 2010 to act as a long term technical partner to VISACAs, thus describing the partnership with Reliance as a win -win situation for both institutions.

Sawaneh disclosed that VISACA Apex intends to use their advantage of proximity to their clientele to bring financial services to all rural dwellers in The Gambia. He Coordinator Rural Finance Project at the Ministry of Agriculture- Lamin Fatajo also expressed similar sentiments.

Copyright The Daily Observer. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

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