The Bank of Ghana is optimistic its new guidelines aimed at regulating microfinance institutions will bring sanity into the industry. The central bank last month published new guidelines to better regulate microfinance institutions in the country. The new guidelines also upped the minimum capital required for all the microfinance institutions. While some analysts have hailed the central bank for this move, others say this is coming rather too late. But Head of Banking Supervision at the Bank of Ghana, Franklin Berlyn, says this is just the first step in address numerous challenges facing the industry. “This thing is a process, it’s not an event; we cannot do all the things in day one but it’s always good to start and work towards achieving the ultimate objective,” he said. For the first phase, Mr Berlyn said, the main focus will be to register licenses “and then we move on to on-sight supervision, reporting and monitoring.” He said a new unit at the bank, the Microfinance Commission Unit, has been dedicated to sector. Mr. Berlyn was speaking on Joy Fm’s Business and Economic analysis program Business Trends. The new guidelines show that all financial institutions and persons engaged in deposit taking will have to be granted licenses by the Bank of Ghana before they can operate. Source: Joy Business/Ghana