The monthly submissions of data on individual loans by financial institutions to credit bureaus agencies in the country reduced from 2.72 million in 2018 to 1.94 million in 2019, according to the annual report on credit referencing activity released by the Bank of Ghana.
This represents a decrease of 28.5 percent.
“There was a significant drop in the average number of records submitted to credit bureaus on monthly basis in 2019. While an average of 2,719,281 records of data were submitted to credit bureaus in 2018 on a monthly basis, a reduced number of 1,943,416 records were submitted in the year under review by all financial institutions”.
The report also indicated that there was a sharp decline of about 47 percent in average data submissions by banks to credit bureaus every month. Average individual loan data submissions made by banks decreased to 577084 in the year 2019 from an average of 1,087,630 once-a-month.
“The average total number of records submitted by banks on a monthly basis reduced by 47% in 2019”.
The report disclosed that the reductions in average monthly data submissions were either as a result of the repayment of 2018 loan arrears by banks or a reduction in loan advancement by banks to businesses and individuals in 2019. More so, the report added that owing to the collapse of some Special Deposit Institutions (SDIs), the loan data of their customers were pending submission to the credit bureaus.
“The reduction in records suggest that either a significant number of loan records from 2018 were paid off or banks reduced the number of new loans advanced to both business and individuals in 2019”.
“The reduction in records submitted by the SDIs were as a result of the collapse of some SDIs in the year under review. Loan data relating to customers of such institutions domiciled at the Receiver were yet to be submitted to the credit bureaus as at December 2019”.
The Bank of Ghana in their report presented a table of figures on the average monthly individual and corporate loan data submission by all subsectors. In terms of individual loan data submission except for rural and community banks there was a steady and consistent decline in all subsectors including banks, non-bank financial institutions, and microfinance from 2018 to 2019. For corporate loan data submission whereas banks and non-bank financial institutions saw a reduction in average monthly loan data submission, rural and community banks as well as microfinance recorded an improvement from 2018s performance.
“Rural and Community Banks and Microfinance Companies however recorded an increase in the number of individual customer loan records submitted to credit bureaus. This is an improvement over previous year’s performance”.
Additionally, the report went on to say that “Data submitted to credit bureaus on corporate customers of financial institutions also reduced by 3% compared to 2018 monthly submissions. This reduction could have been worse but for the significant increase of 740% of business customer records submitted on monthly basis by the rural banks”.
