Nigeria is establishing credit bureaux which should help stimulate wider lending by banks to individuals and small businesses, seen as key to the emergence of a middle class in sub-Saharan Africa’s number two economy.
Three credit bureaux — two already licensed and a third still awaiting approval — are collating information on the status of borrowers in Africa’s most populous nation, which they hope will enable banks to make better lending decisions.
Better financial services regulation is one of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s top priorities following the $2.6 billion bailout last month of five banks whose reckless lending left them so weakly capitalized that they posed a systemic risk.
Much of that lending was to stock market speculators and fuel marketers, essentially a bet on the price of oil, rather than to the real economy — the productive private sector and salaried individuals looking to make big-ticket purchases. Read the rest of this entry »
FIFA is warning football fans to beware of fake tickets for next year’s World Cup in South Africa as it cracks down on fraudulent Internet sales.
IBM and Canonical are introducing a new, flexible personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices to help businesses in Africa bridge the digital divide by leapfrogging traditional PCs and proprietary software. This is the first cloud and on-premise-based Linux netbook software package offered by IBM and Canonical, the companies announced recently.
