Banks Must Place Premium On Apprenticeship – FBN Bank Ghana CEO

The Chief Executive Officer of FBN Bank Ghana, Victor Asante, is urging the banking sector to put more emphasis on apprenticeship in order to raise more high-quality bankers.

Speaking at the annual Opoku Ware Old Boys Association’s Burgess Kalinauckas Adu-Amankwah Memorial Lectures, Mr. Asante said apprenticeship provides employers a good opportunity to assess a pool of talents to identify what the business will require in the future.

The FBN Bank Ghana CEO who spoke on the topic: Preventing the next financial crisis – getting it right with training, education and apprenticeship, said there are several lessons inherent the financial sector clean-up which took place over the last three years.

According to him, the education framework that produces bankers in this country focuses less on internship and apprenticeship.

He added that even though apprenticeship will not guarantee a job opportunity, it provides a great advantage by creating the platform to acquire experience.

“For employers, it is a way of assessing a pool of talent to identify the talent the business will require in the future. In some cases also, it can be used to nurture capability, fill skill gaps and aid succession planning for existing staff.”

“Apprenticeship enhances one’s values, ethics and professional attitudes which are important ingredients in addition to other capabilities,” he stated.

Training manual

Mr. Asante also urged the Bank of Ghana to consider developing a comprehensive report on the banking sector crisis to be used as a manual for the training of bankers in the country.

He believes a case study on the happenings in the financial sector in recent years will be a useful document that will ensure the sector does not plunge into such a crisis again.

“I wish to propose that the recent events in the industry are documented in the form of a case study. This should state the causes, consequences, lessons and the way forward; similar to the report of special investigations commission in Iceland,” Mr. Asante stated.

He drew comparisons with similar banking sector failure in Iceland which was occasioned by the global financial crisis in 2008, which had a severe impact on the banking industry in Iceland.

The entire Icelandic banking system failed within a span of one week, which led to mass protests and eventually forced the government to resign.

Although a report was generated on the entire happenings in Iceland and was made public, he added that Ghana needs to go a step further and ensure the case study it develops is made part of the curricular of educational institutions and departments where banking and finance is taught.

The production of such a case study, he argued, should involve all those who matter to ensure that it is complete and fit for the purpose that it is produced for.

Ghana’s financial sector clean-up saw nine indigenous banks losing their licenses, whiles nearly 400 hundred other financial institutions also collapsed for various infractions and insolvency.