The Managing Director of ARB Apex Bank, the regulator for the sector, Kojo Mattah has hinted of plans to list some of these banks on the Ghana Alternative Exchange (GAX).

Speaking to JoyBusiness, he said the Apex bank was in talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other allied agencies to list some of the banks on the Ghana Alternative Market as those on the Club 100.

This comes at a time when rural and community banks race to meet the ¢1 million minimum capital requirement set by the Bank of Ghana, 

“We have started the processes and we have talked to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), have had some discussion with USAID, and there are things we are doing to proceed on this tangent.

"Therefore very soon Rural and community banks will be seen on the Ghana Alternative Market as we have seen them on the Ghana Club 100," he said.

According to him, those who have not met the minimum capital requirement are seriously willing to go through these processes and those who have already met it are also considering it. 

He explained that this gives them the opportunity to shareholders and would have wished to sell their shares to be able to trade their shares.

The call for rural and community banks to list their shares on the SEC to enable shareholders to sell their shares has been on the drawing on board for some time now. 

There has been a call on the Central Bank not to give rural banks ceiling share capital to enable them to pay adequate dividends to their shareholders.

The Managing Director of ARB Apex bank pointed out that, pointed out that, these banks needed to go beyond the idea of community ownership and list on the stock market to attract both local and foreign investment to expand their activities.

Mr Mattah again said although there had been some challenges, the performance of some RCBs in the last three decades showed they were matured. 

He believes they are well-positioned to take advantage of the enormous potential at the rural banking sub-sector if they could attract enough capital for their operations.

He said they required opening up for investments to pull long-term capital to boost their operations.