BoI disbursed over N270 billion loans in 2018

The Bank of Industry (BoI) disbursed over N270billion in 2018, the Executive Director, Large Enterprises, Bank of Industry, Mr. Simon Aranonu has said.

Speaking in an interview with The Nation at the weekend, he said, the Bank generated a total of N36billioin as profit within the same period, as against N22 billion made in the previous year.

According to Aranonu, BoI in the last 18 months has also grown its balance sheet from N700b in 2017 to N1.1trillion as of Dec 31 2018.

While commenting on the modus operandi deployed by the Bank to resolve loan repayment, Aranonu revealed that just like any other bank those who borrow from BoI and have the capacity to pay but refuse to pay will not be allowed to go scot free, adding that there is a legal framework put in place to address cases of loan default.

“However, given that we are a development bank, we are more patient with our borrowers. When a customer genuinely has borrowers, we support them in diverse ways. We will restructure such loans and grant them extension. In some cases we provide additional funds if that would solve the problems,” he said.

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“Generally our loan process is very rigorous and our risk management process is extremely robust. This ensures our loan default is extremely low,” he stressed.

The BoI boss who revealed that the Bank has assisted a lot of businesses to thrive over the years, said over 90% of the nation’s manufacturers are among the major beneficiaries.

“Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has a representative on board of BoI. Beyond the large enterprises, we finance small scale manufacturers all over the nation.  We serve them from our 22 branches across the nation,” he said.

Besides manufacturing, Aranonu said BoI also funds soft service industry. “We have funded the creative industry heavily through movie content development financing and movie theatre. Today over 70 % of the movie theatres in Nigeria were financed by BoI, we have financed many hospitals and diagnostic centers and we are currently financing the biggest cancer treatment center in Africa which is under construction. We have been financing the solar energy development across the nation by setting up a special single digit interest rate fund for financing developers,” he explained.