FINANCIAL INCLUSION AND BANKING RESTRUCTURING, 19 NOV

 FINANCIAL INCLUSION AND BANKING RESTRUCTURING

The current government ‘s interest in the banking sector has become striking to the point that it can be said that the government is actually undertaking the “financial inclusion program, whose founders aim to deliver services to all regions of the country and include all societal and age groups with these services with the aim of encouraging all citizens to open bank accounts, and then withdraw the cash mass hoarded by the public, which the Central Bank estimates at about 70 percent of the issued cash, and circulate it in the banking arena activities, with the aim of raising credit rates and contributing to creating real development.

On this basis, the Prime Minister’s Office’s statement came in this regard recently, which referred to some of the challenges facing the efforts to reform the financial and banking system, as one of the priorities of the government program, while the statement identified a number of steps with the aim of confronting these challenges and ensuring the strengthening of confidence in the financial and banking sectors, facilitating the process of economic development, and raising indicators of financial inclusion.

However, the clear intersection between the government’s direction and the banking restructuring program indicates a number of observations that are directly related to these steps, such as the contradiction between what was stated in the content of these government steps, and the banks’ procedures regarding restructuring, as some government banks have taken steps.

The issue of restructuring, which was apparently limited to the merger of large numbers of branches of operating government banks, included branches on the outskirts of governorate centers and in the middle of them, which undermined the service area in which these banks operate. This completely intersects with the financial inclusion program, one of the tools of which the statement specified is “providing banking services to different segments of society, including districts and sub-districts in villages and rural areas.”

The steps mentioned in the statement, which are in the process of intensifying efforts, did not indicate the issue of the conditions previously set regarding raising the capital rates of banks to about 450 billion dinars by the end of December 2024, which obligated all private and government banks in this regard, otherwise these banks will be merged or liquidated, if we know that some government banks whose many branches have been merged still have a large number of branches, and these branches still provide their daily services to large numbers of the public, while they are exposed to merger or liquidation, even some administrations are unable to make some decisions related to developing services, because they realize that the fate of their banks will end in merger or liquidation, and this is what makes the intersection clear in the government’s direction regarding developing the performance of banks and expanding the scope of services with the restructuring program implemented by the relevant authorities.