Banks reject 94% export financing requests – Consultant

The Lead Consultant, 3T Impex Consulting, Dr Bamidele Ayemibo, has said 94 per cent of Nigerian exporters’ requests for export financing are rejected by banks.

Ayemibo, made the statement at a programme themed ‘Stimulating Export Financing Growth in Nigeria,’ held at the NECA House in Lagos.

He said in a survey aimed at unravelling the challenges hindering the growth of export in Nigeria, out of 227 exporters who made export financing requests from banks, only 11 per cent of them sailed through.

Ayemibo said, “The objective of the programme is to use a scientific method to paint a picture of the current status of export in Nigeria so that at the end of the day, all the initiative of the government is not wasted if we are not able to address the real problem.

“So, we interrogated 227 exporters to get the exact challenges hindering the growth of export in Nigeria and used the feedback of that to proffer solutions to some of those challenges.”

He pointed out that one of the major challenges was that 94 per cent of Nigerian exporters, according to the survey, have their requests for export financing rejected by the banks and just about 11 per cent have their export financing requests approved.

“So, we realised that there are problems on the part of the exporters and on the part of the banks.”

 Explaining further, Ayemibo said one of the reasons exporters’ requests for financing got rejected by the banks was because a number of exporters were not ready, adding that the banks were also not ready because most of them were used to financing imports.

He added, “Some of the assessment criteria for financing exports that they are using are what they use for other means of transaction. But there are other models that they can use to assess risks and do good credit scoring and be able to still finance not recklessly and still avoid losses on the transaction.

“The banks need capacity building; the government needs to support them with credit insurance, and I think we should reduce the rate at which the government is asking banks to give guarantees. Government should rather be giving banks guarantee so that banks can give the money out, while the government carries the risks of growing export in the country like many other countries have done.”