Clean-up boosts Ghana’s bank sector
A regulatory spring clean that has cut the number of Ghanaian banks by almost a third is strengthening the industry, brightening prospects for lending growth and easing the pain of unpaid debts.
The expanding economy is also helping lenders put behind them years of challenges weighing on the West African nation, including daily power outages, poor banking regulation and an inflation rate that has averaged 14% since 2013.
Flush with cash after a recapitalisation exercise by the central bank, lenders are poised to see a drop in nonperforming loans and higher returns, according to Moody’s Investors Service and Databank Group.
“The economy over the last two years has been on a path of steady improvement,” said Kwesi Boti, an economist at Accra-based Databank. “With the robust growth outlook, banks should find a lot of bankable propositions and not get trapped in loan defaults the way we’ve seen.”
The central bank in 2017 tripled capital requirements to bolster weak buffers and protect lenders against shocks as nonperforming loans surged to record levels. The regulator also revoked licences and helped to combine some companies, bringing down the number of lenders to 23 from 34.
The process is bearing fruit. Annual loan growth jumped to 13% at the end of December from 0.4% in March, when banks were focused on propping up their balance sheets. That could rise to 15% over the next 18 months, said Peter Mushangwe, a banking analyst at Moody’s.
“The larger size and higher capital levels will allow surviving banks to underwrite larger corporate loans, supporting their revenue,” he said.
Nonperforming loans, which reached a record high of 23.4% at the end of April, will remain high, Mushangwe said, but will improve as banks add new credit to their books as the economy recovers.
Moody’s estimates that banks’ return on assets will improve to 4% over the next 18 months, from an average of 3.4% in 2018.
The Ghana Stock Exchange financial stocks index, which tracks the performance of banks and insurance companies, advanced a second day, by 0.1% to 2,048.4 at mid-morning on Tuesday, trimming its loss this year to 1.4%.
The banking industry’s woes have their roots in arrears owed by the government for loans to power utilities going back more than 20 years. The debt, spread across 19 lenders, had to be booked as nonperforming loans after the central bank introduced new accounting regularities in 2016.
The government is repaying the loans by issuing bonds. Over the past 16 months it has issued 5.7-billion cedis ($1.1bn) worth of the debt, with 4.3-billion cedis still outstanding. It has also announced plans to start a debt sale next month of 2-billion cedis to prop up five well-managed lenders that failed to meet the December 31 deadline for new capital thresholds.
Ecobank Transnational banking analyst George Bodo estimates that 2.5-billion cedis in fresh capital has been injected into the system, of which 1.6-billion cedis came from rights offerings and 900-million cedis by way of capitalising revenue.
“We expect nonperforming loans to decline over time as the government finalises on its obligations and balance sheets become strong enough to absorb marginal increments,” said Bodo.
Unpaid loans will remain stable at about 18% in 2019, while loan books will expand about 3%, he said.
“Surviving banks will reap positively by way of stronger balance sheets and the attendant capability to book big-ticket transactions.”
23 the number of banks operating in Ghana, which has been whittled down from a total of 34