The company, which currently focuses on the formally employed segment of the market with unsecured, salary based term-loan offering, will expand its operations to provide secure lending to this new group.

The Managing Director of Izwe Ghana, Mr Raymond Bismarck, announced this when the company took its turn on the Facts behind the Figures session on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) in Accra.

He said, “in the last five years we have only focused on government employees, it is time to look at the informal sector, and the private. We want to go there but we need to make sure that it is in the interest of our stakeholders and, therefore, we are looking at only secure lending.”

Secure lending, he said, meant that every advance given to clients would have guarantors and securities.

Business strategy

He said the company was able to survive the adverse impact of the worsening economic conditions because of on the strategies it employed.

“We are in a period where people are making losses, employers are sending their employees home but we have done directly opposite. We have recruited people, opened branches, distributed enough loans and we are making profit, and that is the most important thing,” he said.

He said the key thing was how to get the loans given out back to the company and Izwe had put in effective systems to deal with that.

“One key thing is how you get your money back and for Izwe, the process starts from giving out the loans. You ask yourself how well you know the people you are giving the loans to, what kind of relationship you intend to build after giving the loans to them, because monitoring is very key,” he said.

He said the company had built a solid distribution system for its products and services, although it had shifted from the traditional expansion way of opening branches to building solid and well-trained sales force handling over 60,000 customers with just nine branches in the country.