CBN Injects USD 210 Mn Into Forex Market, Supports SMEs And Urges Advancement In Credit Culture
The Central Bank of Nigeria has injected USD 210 Mn into the foreign exchange market in a bid to meet the requests of customers in various segments of the market. The bank offered USD 100 Mn to authorized dealers in the wholesale segment and USD 55 Mn to Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises which make up their own segment.
BoI urged that SMEs encourage credit offerings. It has made this move to meet the needs of customers requesting Forex for Invisibles such as tuition fees, medical payments, providing fundamental travel allowance.
According to a statement following this injection, “The CBN, following an earlier take-off of its intervention in the sale of foreign exchange in Chinese Yuan, injected a USD 340,507,376.51 Bn sum into the inter bank retail secondary market intervention sales. This was in addition to the sale of CNY 69,858,087.15 in the spot and short-tenored forward”.
The Naira continued its stable in the foreign exchange market, at an average of 360/USD 1 in the Bureau De Change segment of the market as of July 31, 2018.
In other news, CBN said it had disbursed NGN 170 Bn out of the NGN 220 BN for SMEs. At an SME-centered funding workshop organised by Bankers’ Committee in Lagos, the Senior Manager of the Department of Finance, CBN, Chinedu Zephaniah stated, however, that the percentage of people that repaid the loans at the appropriate time was not encouraging.
Zephaniah said that “To access all CBN-engineered interventions, what SMEs need to do is convince their respective banks that the taken loans will be repaid as and when due.”
“When people pat back on the agreed dates, it will avail others the opportunity to access the fund. As SMEs, if you collect loans to create wealth and refund them as and when due, the confidence of lending institutions will grow, and we will collectively be achievers of substantial growth” he said.
Most businesses crumble, not due to lack of funding, but as a result of the lack of competent managerial skills, according to Dike, who then urged financial businesses to concentrate on business knowledge creation and administrative capacity among SMEs.
Waheed Olangunju, the Executive Director of SME, Bank of Industry, who was represented by Obaro Osah, the Regional Manager, described SMEs as the foundation of industrialisation in any economy. He said there I a tripling impact that comes with the development of SMEs in the country. “We are developing products to address specific problems. We have about 42 already identified clusters across the federation”, he stated.
