Dr. Benedict Oramah, Afreximbank President
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, Amr Kamel, Executive Vice President, Business Development
and Corporate Banking, at the African Export and Import Bank
(Afreximbank), said today in Casablanca, Moroco.
Mr.
Kamel, who was speaking while declaring open the Afreximbank Annual
Customer Due Diligence and Corporate Governance (ACDICOG) forum, said
that there were 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 told participants. “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
(AFRICORRBANKING) 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.
ACDICOG,
now in its fifth year, enables participants from across the continent
to deliberate on the effectiveness of current measures and to assess
whether these are adequately promoting good governance and due
diligence practices. It provides a platform for sharing ideas and for
the implementation of best practices in addition to paving the way
for a collaborative approach to de-risking issues affecting Africa.
The
theme for this year’s forum is “Developing Capabilities to
Minimise Negative Perception about Correspondent Banking in Africa:
Enhancing Compliance, Governance and Financial Inclusion”.
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