Luanda, Angola, 13 June – The chief executive of Banco Africano de Investimentos (BAI), Inokcelina Santos said Friday in Luanda that the future Credit Risk Information Centre was “extremely” important for commercial banking in order to establish the debt conditions and capacity of customers.

Speaking to Angolan news agency Angop about the advantages of the service, which is due to be created by the end of the year by National Bank of Angola, Santos added that it was also “extremely,” important for the central bank to prevent and detect crises within the financial system, as it would provide both positive and negative information about “the behaviour of customers in relation to credit taken on from commercial banks.”

“The risk centre is already operating, although only in an experimental phase, but within the next six months it will be fully operational, and it is still necessary to clean up databases to reduce the margin of error of the information provided to commercial banks,” she said.

“With this centre commercial banks will have information available about the customer’s history in terms of bank exposure, level of debt servicing, and thus banks will know whether or not customers pay their loan and be able to prevent over-indebtedness of their customers, which is something that can lead to crises,” she said.

The centre is an IT system that is linked to all financial institutions and banks are required to submit information about credit operations to the risk centre on a monthly basis. (macauhub)