Bank, credit bureau ink pact to curb loans defaulting rate
June 23, 2015 - IPP Media.com

The National Microfinance bank (NMB) has entered into an agreement with Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau (CRB) to strengthen its credit management processes and curb defaulting. 

This partnership is expected to reduce the bank’s share of non-performing loans. In 2014 financial results, the Non-Performing Loans (NPL) stood at 2.6 percent the lowest in the banking industry in Tanzania. NMB believes its partnership with Dun & Bradstreet would improve the NPL even better.

Credit Reference Bureau has become part and parcel of credit processing within NMB whereby CRB checks will be done to all loan applications for further processing.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, the bank’s Managing Director – Ineke Bussemaker said the partnership has come at the right time and banks are working hard to ensure that they have lower non-performing loans as possible.

“With this partnership, Dun & Bradstreet will support NMB to do quick and prudent credit decision as well as increase customer loyalty and positive impact on business growth. Dun & Bradstreet therefore would play a key role in the growth of the entire economy and let us hold the idea for the better debt culture that benefits all of us,” Ineke said.

She also added that with over 2 million customers the bank is in need of this partnership to help the internal credit processing.

The Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau General Manager - Adebowale Atobatele said: “We are delighted to have NMB subscribe to our Credit Reference Bureau Services and with the innovation of automated credit checks, we believe that NMB’s overall objectives remain aligned to ours and that the whole process culminates into a new lending, borrowing and repayment behaviour that delivers to us all a stronger and inclusive financial sector”. Atobatele further said that the system will help in lending and repayment behaviour and automatically eliminate the loan defaulters.

With the new relationship between NMB and D&B, analysts believe that the past behaviours of serial loan defaulting and subjective lending have come to an end as now, all credit applications will have to be vetted thoroughly to ensure that creditworthy applicants get access to loan as promptly as required.

Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau Tanzania Limited is the newest equity-bureau of Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureaus Limited (D&B) - a company that has so far, played a pivotal role in developing the financial infrastructure of several economies across the globe.