The Managing Director of Ecobank Ghana, Mr Samuel Ashittey Adjei, has assured the stakeholders of the banking industry that the acquisition of the Trust Bank by Ecobank is to draw synergies of the two banks and make the industry more competitive. Speaking to the Daily Graphic in an interview, Mr Ashittey Adjei acknowledged the strength of the Trust Bank in assisting small and medium-scale enterprises. “This is an area we want to scale up, which is why we want to tap into their expertise so that we grow the country’s 5MB banking operations,” he said. Ecobank, which is well noted for its corporate banking business, plans to acquire TTB for the latter’s retail banking network and its small and medium-sized enterprises in a deal that has generated a lot of controversy. The Bank of Ghana has consequently set up a three-member committee to receive memoranda on the merger deal from stakeholders. There are concerns of possible job losses, branch closure and the squeeze of credits to the small and medium-scale enterprises. But Mr Ashittey-Adjei assured the customers and staff of TTB that there would not be job losses when the deal was finalised and okayed by the Bank of Ghana, except for staff who had engaged in some financial malpractice. He said Ecobank hoped to leverage on TTB’s SME banking operations and create a bigger and competitive industry with a vibrant small enterprise sector. According to him, since the inception of Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI), the parent company of Ecobank Ghana, ETI has made eleven acquisitions with no single job loss or branch closure. “The SMEs will be best served when the acquisition is concluded, because the staff of TTB will continue to do what they know doing best,” he said. He mentioned that when the merger was concluded, the transition would take some time for the integration process to be complete. He mentioned the establishment of the human resource committee to integrate the human resource base of the two banks, the business committee, risk management committee, and the operations and technology committee to supervise all the integration and the transition process.