Govt, financial institutions in bank charges talks

For a long time viewed as one of the major threats to government’s drive towards financial inclusion, bank charges may be normalized if talks between banks and government bear fruit.

The Central Bank and government have been failing to come up with a position for some time.

In a presentation in Parliament last week, Deputy Finance minister Clemence Chiduwa accused banks of playing a role in the current economic chaos.

“The bank charges being levied by our financial institutions are high. Even if we look at the performance of our banks, above 84 percent of their profits come from bank charges and we have engaged the banks and the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe (BAZ). The major reason they gave us was that most of their solutions are imported.

“We have implored BAZ to say let us try to ensure that the solutions that we use in Zimbabwe are local solutions. At the moment we cannot direct them to reduce the bank charges but what we are saying is that collectively as BAZ, they need to re-look at their charges so that they are in line with the market,” Chiduwa said.

He added that what investors want is to ensure is that they get a positive return. Chiduwa said people were borrowing money in order to fund parallel market activities.