It is now a common occurrence, especially within the banking sector, to read financial reports pointing to the country’s ‘weak economic showings’ as the cause of inability to achieve profit and deposit targets among others.
But the Chief Executive of Proven Trusted Solutions Mr. Joseph Akossey has said this practice should stop, and urged Rural Community Banks to convert these challenges into opportunities.
He said the management of RCBs, having seen macroeconomic challenges as setbacks to efforts to realise their financial targets, should endeavour to counter it by coming out with strategies to mitigate the macroeconomic challenges and create value for shareholders.
“It is worth mentioning that the macroeconomic challenges are threats, yet they can be converted into opportunities,” he said.
Mr. Akossey said rural banks should not focus solely on building operations but also direct some of their attention to pursuing aggressive and effective marketing operations to achieve their targets. He added that this will also help them to survive and thrive in a competitive environment.
“Effective marketing operations embraces new product development; brand management; marketing research; and customer relationship management among others,” he stated.
To do so, he proposed that rural banks should have strong marketing departments headed by qualified marketing managers who can formulate effective competitive marketing strategies to increase deposits, customer-base and also ensure customer retention.
The marketing research consultant, who made these remarks in an interview at the sidelines of a sales training programme for mobile bankers of Mumuadu Rural Bank Limited at Osino, also asked RCBs to consider investing in building stronger brands as against focusing on short-term profit.
He maintained that having a stronger brand will result in achieving long-term impressive profit.
On matters relating to labour, he said government and the central bank should reconsider inflation-targetting, which has resulted in tight monetary policy and is likely lead to low growth and high unemployment.
At the moment, the rate of unemployment among graduates is very high and he fears that the inflation-targetting framework will worsen the situation if allowed to continue.
“Although low inflation has many benefits we should not ignore other economic objectives, especially employment; it is not advisable to stick rigidly to low inflation when there is an unemployment crisis in the country.
“Controlling inflation is an important economic objective but it is not the only one. It is worth noting that unemployment has a greater social cost than inflation.
“Tight monetary policy by the BoG in terms of using higher interest rates has a tendency to reduce spending and investment. This therefore results in in reduction of aggregate demand, which will lead to decline in employment,” he argued.
He therefore appealed for government to bring out a better policy to reduce unemployment, as well as collect and publish data on employment monthly or quarterly as is done in other countries.
The sales training workshop focused on equipping the mobile bankers with knowledge in effective prospecting, customer retention strategies, deposit mobilisation strategies among others.