Africa-Press – Angola. The Angolan banking and financial market is approaching the European supervisory framework inscribed in the Basel-3 principles, although it still faces challenges related to digitalization and technological evolution, after having observed, in recent times, a high potential solidification and rapid growth.
This was declared by the executive director of Banco Caixa Geral de Angola (BCGA) Francisco dos Santos, on the sidelines of the press conference that marked the opening of the sale on the stock exchange of 25 percent of the stake held indirectly by the State in the bank.
The Basel-3 European supervisory framework, recalled Francisco dos Santos, represents an extremely important step towards the control, transparency and governance of banks.
According to the executive director of the BCGA, banks seek to adhere to this process because, those who do not do so, will be unable to remain in business and operate in the market, so it is an “extremely important step” for the Angolan financial market can attract international banks with a different risk in terms of reciprocity and correspondence services.
“The digitization and digital evolution of banking is one of the biggest challenges today, with Angola being a fantastic market for this process, because there are many young people who, from a very early age, adhered to digital processes, so that banks are forced to follow this trend with investments, or they will be outside of what is the banking development of this country”, he warned.
Francisco dos Santos refuted the idea that digitalization is a process to push people away: “we shouldn’t think like that, because many countries, in different geographies and continents, followed this process and verified that people are always necessary to manage, create or adapt digital processes”.
In this case, he added, “there is only a conversion from what was the traditional collaborator to what the digital collaborator is”.
Second bank on the stock exchange
The quality of the second bank under Angolan law to be listed on the stock exchange reflects a huge responsibility for BCGA, despite its smaller size compared to the first banking institution to place part of its shares on the Angolan Debt and Securities Exchange (BODIVA).
Francisco dos Santos considered that the BCGA, compared to the Banco Angolano de Investimentos (BAI), has a very small size, as it is a medium-sized institution, occupying between the sixth or seventh place among national banks, according to the criteria used in the system, however, “has other characteristics that make it great”.
Asked about the degree of exposure to cyber attacks, the executive director assured that the institution “is so protected that, at times, it takes a long time to send an email, for example, to the mother house, due to the fact that there are so many firewalls ( antivirus)”.
Cybersecurity, he declared, “is in our strategic pillar, that is, it is a point that we do not neglect and we have great support from the structure of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, in Lisbon, so we are very calm about this process, even though it is common knowledge that, today, no one is completely calm” when talking about this issue.
Francisco dos Santos stated, on the other hand, that the price established for the shares aims to allow an Angolan from the general public to acquire a fraction of the bank, without great discomfort in their personal finances, so that the BCGA has “shares that are affordable for the market order”.
The official added that the bank sees prices as “adequate to what is intended for the dynamism of the market”.
He made it known that Banco Caixa’s Angolan shareholders had pre-emption rights established in agreements and “sought to facilitate this operation, abdicating the exercise of their right in relation to the entirety for sale, having, with this sacrifice, the possibility of strengthening the bank’s capital by this way”.
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