SME Bank's groundwork laid for effective takeoff

Administrative, fiscal and para-fiscal formalities have been set up alongside procedures.

The preparatory work is intensifying at the Nlongkak head office of the Bank for Small and Medium-size Enterprises (BC-PME), with the management team burning midnight candles for the bank’s effective start.

Administrative, fiscal and para-fiscal formalities have been ironed out alongside the four activity procedures; functional, legal, commercial and control mechanisms.

The stakes are high and the management team is cognisant of the fact that BC-PME is expected to improve the financing of SMEs, which are facing difficulties to access credit, since they are not able to provide the guarantees required by banks. This explains why “work is in full gear.”

Administrative work is intensifying while completion of the building is on course. Work days in the building are characterised by meetings with the architect, phone calls to service providers, working sessions with the project team and the inspection of ongoing completion work on the structure.

But when quizzed on when customers can start hustling for loans in the bank, the response was shifty. Starting a bank is not like opening a small shop. It is complex and entails working with many parties to put in place procedures to harmonise activities.

The BC-PME is closely working with the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), the constable of banking activities in the Central African Sub-region (COBAC), the Association of Professional Banking Institutions in Cameroon (APECAM), Auditors and supervisory government institutions. BC-PME can boast of a head office which management has been using since September 15, 2014.

But according to officials, there is the need to complete the construction work, equip the offices, recruit and train competent staff and install a viable information and surveillance system, an enviable data centre, and an electric and telephone network. All of this is being put in place.

Earlier mentioned by the Head of State at the Ebolowa Agric-pastoral Show in 2011, and piloted by Agnes Ndoumbe Mandeng as General Manager and Théodore Foumane as Board Chair, BC-PME, while waiting for effective opening, is laying the groundwork.

It should be recalled that the Minister of Finance, Alamine Ousmane Mey, answering questions from the press at the opening of a two-day annual conference of personnel of the central and devolved services of his ministry that held in Yaounde on January 29-30, 2015, announced the imminent start of the bank. The bank will operate with a social capital of FCFA 10 billion