Business Information Industry Association
October 10th, 2012
Tanzania’s central bank has licensed the country’s first credit reference bureau to encourage information sharing among banks to spur lending and lower commercial interest rates, it said on Friday. Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureaus and Analytics was licensed to operate the credit reference bureau.
“Access to individual or company’s credit history reduces incidences of institutions lending to habitual defaulters,” said Juma Reli, deputy governor at the central bank. Banks in Tanzania suffer from high credit risk exposure partly due to a lack of sufficient information about borrowers, analysts said. “The retail lending rates are very high in Tanzania, with commercial banks charging rates of up to 22 percent,” said Moremi Marwa, CEO of Tanzania Securities Limited. “In the previous quarter, some major commercial banks had over 10 percent non-performing loans, which is quite a high rate.”
Credit to the private sector grew at an annual rate of 19.7 percent in the year to July 2012, compared with 25.3 percent recorded a year ago, the central bank said on its website.
Miguel Llenas, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureaus and analytics Ltd during the formal launching of this project stated: “D&B will make all necessary efforts and will provide all the required resources and investments to deliver to the Tanzanian market a top of its class Credit Bureau that will allow financial inclusion to those most disadvantage today in the financial realm, boosting MFI’s and SME’s business to the next level of proficiency and penetration in this beautiful country”.