Credit Reference Bureau goes live on July 31

ZIMBABWE’S Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) is set to be fully operational by the end of next month.

The chief bank examiner at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Ruzayi Chiviri said a Czech firm, Creditinfo, that was engaged to set up the CRB’s soft infrastructure had so far made significant strides.

The central bank engaged Creditinfo to set up the country’s CRB at a cost of $1, 8million.

“We expect the Credit Reference Bureau to be online by 31 July. We’ve been able to procure the soft infrastructure to run the Credit Registry.

‘‘When we engaged them (Creditinfo) they came to inspect the hardware at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and they were satisfied. And we signed a contract with them on April 14, 2016.

“Subsequent to that we were then supposed to define the data that we should collect from industry and the banking sector. We’ve had several consultative meetings with banking institutions in order to make sure they understand because the users of the system are the banking institutions and other credit providers and they’ve indicated to us the sort of reports that they want to see coming from the system

“Creditinfo has now used that information to come up with the templates in the system that will be able to generate the reports. They’ve indicated that they’ll give us a customised version of the system on June 16 (Thursday), and we will run a test on the same day,” said Chiviri.

According to the World Bank, credit registries generally developed to support the State’s role as a supervisor of financial institutions. Experts say the bureau should enhance the verification process of borrowers, enabling bankers to assess credit risk and reduce the level of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the banking sector. And it will also allow lenders to determine how much and at what rates to lend, as well as promote transparency in the economy to the extent of greater sharing of information, making financial institutions aware of their customers’ financial exposures.

Significant progress in the development of the CRB comes as the Banking Act has been amended to provide backing for its establishment.

“We sought to finalise the amendments to the Banking Act, which provides the legal backing to provide for the setting up of the Credit Reference Bureau. The law is now in place.

‘‘We’ve a banking amendment Act No. 12 of 2015, which was gazetted a few weeks ago,” he added.

RBZ is to licence private credit bureaus. Chiviri said with the CRB coming on board, the RBZ will also establish an internal unit that will license and monitor private credit bureaus.

“The technical assistance mission from the World Bank shall come back in July to assist us because as part of the legal framework we must work with the private credit bureaus that are already operating in our market.

“The RBZ will have a unit that will license them, so we need to do an assessment of the operations of the private bureaus and prescribe the standards which they should follow and we need them to scale up their operations.”- BH24.