85% of it is in homes... “Hoarded cash” is the most difficult equation in reforming the banking system, 24 OCT

  85% of it is in homes... “Hoarded cash” is the most difficult equation in reforming the banking system

Today, Monday (October 23, 2023), the financial advisor to the Prime Minister, Mazhar Mohamed Saleh, set the priorities for reforming the banking system and the conditions for achieving it.

Saleh told the official agency, “The basic function of the banking system is bank credit or granting loans and is based on a basic lever aimed at attracting hoarded funds from outside the banking system and pushing them into banking channels.”

He added, "Banking reform can play its effective role in searching for easy banking mechanisms that help at the same time strengthen credit activity or grant loans, and proceed with financing economic activity more broadly without stumbles in bank liquidity."

He stressed that "this will achieve the goal of central banking reform in achieving easy, low-risk credit, through the availability of reform mechanisms capable of regularizing the flow of funds within the banking system and transferring them from economic surplus units (saved and hoarded) outside the banking system to become in the form of bank deposits that are protected." Sufficient liquidity risks are then transferred through credit or lending operations to financial deficit units that are looking to obtain financing to carry out investment and economic activity.

He pointed out that “the fundamental problem that the banking system suffers from, and the aspiration to reform that system, lies in the following question, which is: How can banks reverse the hoarding equation represented by the public’s retention of about 85% of the issued currency, which is still in the form of hoarded balances outside the banking system and is considered inactive, unused balances?” Effective, and does not provide any important service to the national economy, and that some of it operates with very high usurious borrowing risks?

Saleh believed that “one of the priorities of banking reform is to work to reverse the hoarding equation to become a savings equation with which the public’s surplus funds flow in the form of safe bank deposits, which requires that banks compete to attract deposits and provide loans in accordance with the banking management requirements that banks must work with, whether they are Governmental or private?

The Prime Minister's advisor continued, "Therefore, the basics of banking reform are for banks to search for adequate, effective and influential means that attract the public to open bank accounts, because the bank account is one of the basics of financial inclusion and encouraging individuals of all segments to make bank deposits, and by encouraging means the priority for the depositor to be obtained is On bank credit or banking facilities when needed before others, to ensure that the public is encouraged to make double deposits.

He noted that "the banking system still deals with only 15% of the monetary mass issued into circulation until today, which is called cash leakage outside the banking system, and it is one of the basic indicators from which banking reform begins."

He pointed out that "the priorities of banking reform are achieved in providing competitiveness by winning public deposits by facilitating cash deposit procedures and creating an effective atmosphere of reassurance that the deposited funds are protected according to the law and that the Iraqi Deposit Guarantee Company is the primary protector of deposits against banking risks."

He stated that “the first and final goal of reforming the banking system will remain based on quickly providing facilitated banking services to economic activity with the highest levels of facilitation, in addition to providing positive incentives to the public in order to deposit, whether with encouraging bank interest or facilitating (easy and safe) deposit and withdrawal methods for their money, in addition to obtaining loans.” "Before others."

He pointed out that "the overall banking reform that we are looking forward to requires searching for means that embody the ability to transfer funds from the surplus units that hoard cash wealth (the public), which are mostly unemployed and hoarded, to be transferred to the investment forces that are searching for funds to complete the national income cycle and contribute to economic growth through... Granting credit and carrying out the real productive activity necessary to sustain development, which at the same time requires sustainable bank financing coupled with banking reforms as a precondition.  link