Immediate Past Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Dr. Adu Anane-Antwi, has urged the Bank of Ghana to pay equal attention to non-bank financial institutions as it does banks.

According to him, the Central Bank’s overconcentration on stabilizing the banking sector as a one-stop solution to stabilizing the entire financial sector is flawed.

He said the Central Bank’s neglect of the non-bank financial sector threatens their stability and the stability of the entire financial sector.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said, “I get worried when people like the Bank of Ghana always think that the banking sector stability is almost equal to the financial sector stability.They [the banks] are bigger, but we shouldn’t think that when you stabilize the banking sector, you have stabilized the whole financial sector. That is not true.

“The point is that we have historically been relying on banks in our financial sector and we haven’t moved from there. The Bank of Ghana itself has promoted other non-bank financial institutions (we called them previously) to now they’re specialized deposit taking institutions  and yet still when they’re talking about stabilizing the financial market they think that if you stabilize the banking sector you have finished. That is my worry.”

He added that without the concerted effort of the Bank of Ghana to get all aspects of the financial sector up and running and sufficiently stabilized, the country will fail to meet its financial stability conditionalities under the IMF programme.

“Now you’re encouraging people to invest, investment comes mainly from the investment companies and the financial houses. They are basically people who take the investments; the mutual funds, the securities industry, they are basically investment takers. They take investment from people and channel it to other people.

“You want to encourage these people to take investments from people , you want to encourage people to invest and you’re thinking they’re not part of the financial market to ensure that there is also stability there and you’re thinking of only banking , only banking, and you think you have solved the problem? No.”