The Central Bank had temporarily suspended the two financial institutions for breaching some sections of the Ghana Interbank Forex Market Conduct rules, according to the Bank of Ghana (BoG).

Fidelity Bank and First National Bank were fined a combined 1000 penalty points each and barred from forex trading for 30 days from today, June 29 to July 28, 2023.

But the Bank of Ghana has eased the sanctions allowing the banks to resume forex trading before the expiration of the suspension.

“The two banks have already had their licenses restored two weeks ago. We reduced the punishment by half, so they didn’t go through the full month. They were suspended for only two weeks, so they have been back in the market for some time now”, Govenor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Ernest Addison told the media on Monday.

Specific breaches

The banks were penalized for breaching 3. 4, 3.5 and 3.9 of the Ghana Interbank Forex Conduct rules.

Section 3.4 of Ghana Interbank Forex Market Conduct rules deals with indicative quotes which require the banks to update indicative quotes for buying and selling US dollars at regular intervals, on the Reuters and Bloomberg information systems.

Indicative quotes shall be updated at intervals of no more than 30 minutes. (This will show the price at which a market-maker is prepared to buy and sell at the minimum traded lots).

For section 3.5, it is on trade reporting platforms.

Specifically, all interbank FX trades must be booked on Reuters platform and appropriately confirmed with five minutes after trade is concluded.

These trades must also be reported in the daily FX report submitted to the Bank of Ghana.

The two banks also failed to adhere to section 3.9 on the fixing of the official exchange rate.

It states that, “the Bank of Ghana shall publish the Ghana Cedi reference rate with respect to the US dollar on
the Bank of Ghana website by 16:30 hours GMT daily except on holidays. The reference rate shall be computed using the weighted average exchange rate of all eligible US dollar transactions that are reported to the Bank of Ghana by the cut-off time of 15:30 hours GMT. The Bid and Offer reference rates are calculated by taking a +/- 0.05% bid/ask to spread around the weighted average exchange rate. The reference rate will also be published on Reuters and Bloomberg by 16.30 hours GMT.”