Strong corporate governance and due diligence practices, coupled with the re-establishment of correspondent banking facilities, will ignite African trade and economic growth by improving the continent’s risk profile.
This is the word from Amr Kamel, executive vice-president: business development and corporate banking at the African Export and Import Bank (Afreximbank), speaking at the opening of the Afreximbank Annual Customer Due Diligence and Corporate Governance (ACDICOG) forum.
He says that there are ongoing concerns about the limited availability of reliable and sustainable trade finance in the context of the widening financing gap as a result of the exodus of large global banks and financial institutions from the African trade finance space in the face of increasingly stringent compliance and regulatory regimes.
According to him, that situation can be partly attributed to the over-estimation of African risks which tend to be much larger than the actual risks.
“Afreximbank has made tremendous achievements in addressing the continent’s trade finance needs,” he says. “We have a number of programmes and initiatives to bring together African financial institutions, corporate entities and regulators on customer due diligence and corporate governance matters to learn from best practices, reposition the continent and improve its risk profile.”
These included the Afreximbank African Correspondent Banking initiative, which will expand the access of African banks to correspondent banking facilities tailored to their needs, and the recently launched MANSA Repository Platform which is a centralised database for conducting customer due diligence checks on counterparties in Africa.