François Kanimba, the Governor of the Central Bank has said that customer care in financial institutions is still lacking and requires more improvement.

"Among things we discussed with the financial institution is customer care. They have made improvements but need to work on it,” he said.

Kanimba said this while addressing representatives of financial institutions at Serena Hotel in Kigali City who had convened to discuss the issue of poor customer care.

The attendance included banks, microfinance and insurance institutions. Contrary to last year’s survey by On The Frontier (OTF) Group that divulged that poor customer care deprives the country of $40m (Rwf22.6b) annually, Kanimba added that the figure could be more than that.

Kanimba said that in his previous one-on-one talks with financial institutions they discussed the expansion of financial networks to local areas, credit accessibility and improvement of services.

Presently, the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) and the Private Sector Federation (PSF) are jointly running a pre-customer care campaign which has been on-going for almost a year.

However, in another survey that was conducted by the OTF Group about 900 businesses countrywide disclosed major complaints against the financial institutions that included bureaucracy during credit access, limited product offering, and lack of understanding of the Rwandan populace.

The Governor disclosed that after previous discussions with banks they, "drew action plans to solve some of these problems.”

But he said that the issue of accessing credit with banks was still complex because of the 15 percentage of non performing loans.

During the discussion the stakeholders also posed their grievances against clients’ misconceptions on credit availability.

"When a client comes to you he thinks it is obvious that he will get a loan yet it is not the case. There are requirements,” said Isaiah Chindumba, Chief Operating Officer of Rwanda Commercial Bank (BCR).

In the discussions, the financial institutions agreed that they needed to educate the clients more on their operations and services.

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