NEW BANK TO PROVIDE TRADE FINANCE FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
A REBRANDED commercial bank, Atlasmara Zambia, resulting from a merger between Finance Bank Zambia and BancABC is officially operational and has since pledged to provide trade finance particularly for small businesses in the country.
Atlasmara Zambia is now part of the Atlas Merchant Capital.
Atlas Merchant Capital cofounder and chief executive officer, Robert Diamond, said commercial banks had a responsibility to not only buy Government Treasury Bills and take deposits but assist small businesses to grow.
Mr. Diamond said the bank would concentrate on helping small businesses grow by offering trade finance through long-term loans.
“The minister (Felix Mutati) wants Atlasmara to be more than a vanilla bank, more than just taking deposits and buying Zambian Treasury Bills and I think in general, the banking industry has very simple products here and that is fine, but we want to provide trade finance, we want to help small business loans,
“We want to be able to provide loans that are longterm and not just short-term. So we do not want to be just a simple bank, we want to provide necessary products, we are very ambitious,” Mr. Diamond said.
Speaking in an interview after the launch of the bank’s first branch in Lusaka, Mr. Diamond said Zambia was among the bank’s list of 15 countries it wanted to start operating in because of the ratio of population, demographic and young population that needed the kind of services and product it offered.
In an another interview, Atlasmara Zambia managing director, James Koni, said the company was in Zambia to reshape the banking sector and become one of the top three banks in the country.
Mr. Koni explained that the firm chose to invest in Zambia owing to its conducive business environment and the belief in the economy.
“We brought the two banks and merged them into one, this is an important investment for us and we are glad we have come to this stage and we want to appeal to all customers whether they were Finance Bank customer before or BancABC that they are all now part of Atlasmara,” Mr Koni said.