At a time when the financial sector is recovering from a potential crisis, a new report ranking 30 of Ghana’s universal banks has been launched with Standard Charted Bank adjudged as the most credible.

Zenith Bank, Ecobank, United Bank for Africa and Barclays Bank completed the first five positions as the most credible banks.

Fidelity Bank and Ghana Commercial Bank, both of which are Ghanaian owned banks all made the first ten most credible banks, occupying the eighth and tenth places respectively.

The ranking was done by a team of technical analysts at Konfidants, a management consulting company based in Accra, Johannesburg and Geneva and was based on an assessment of their credibility using Credmap technology- www.credmap.com.

Explaining the details of the credibility ranking, a statement announcing the launch of the report said the ranking is “A novel “credibility-rating” engine that is capable of combining crowdrating and data mining to generate “credibility scores” of individuals and institutions using pooled data about their track record, history, commentary, biography, popular sentiment and reputation. Credmap’s algorithms mash the data together to distill the complex information into compact rankings, scores and benchmarks.”

Key amongst the index used was the quality of bank boards and senior management personnel.

All these were compiled into what has now become the Ghana Banking Credibility Index (GBCI). Some major criteria in the computation of the GBCI therefore included:

A. Executive track record of the board & management membership

B. Educational qualifications of board members and senior management personnel

C. Emphasis on continuous professional development within the studied banks.

D. Reputational factors

E. Degree of board independence from shareholder and management control and influence (this factor was analysed using a proprietary “relationship graph” and “insider connections” rating logic).

F. Consistency and accuracy in board and management communications ascertained from comments in the media, advertising, and publications, including official documentation and reports.

Managing Partner at Konfidants, Michael Kottoh, said the assessment was done from between 2017 and early 2018, adding the figures and details from the report are current.

The ranking comes at a time when two banks- UT and Capital Banks-had their licenses revoked in 2017 with five others- Royal, UniBank, Beige, Sovereign and Construction Banks all consolidated into one bank.

Mr Kottoh, said the banking crisis was fundamentally a failure of leadership – as opposed to the failure stemming from systemic risk in the wider economy.

He also mentioned weak risk management cultures as adequately measurable when personnel competence and track record, and board autonomy and capacity, are used as predictors.

“The analysis also revealed that not enough emphasis is being placed on Continuous Professional Education (CPE) for bank directors; this matters a lot for improving director competence and capacity to supervise management. We think the Bank of Ghana should impose mandatory CPE requirements and more aggressive CPE scores as part of the process of enforcing the broader ‘fit and proper’ rules directive”.

The Coordinator of the Credmap Ghana deployment, Kofi Yeboah, said, “in the months ahead, Credmap will continuously work with its global partners to roll out Credmap’s multi-country financial sector analytics in other African markets and beyond.”

Click here for full details of the rankings