via Banks cut 1,000 jobs last year, union New Zimbabwe 13/01/2015
LOCAL banks cut 1,000 jobs last year, eliminating one post out of every six in the country’s financial services industry, a union official said.
ZB Bank eliminated 500 positions, while Steward Bank and AfrAsia both trimmed 83, said Shepard Ngandu, assistant secretary general of the Zimbabwe Banks and Allied Workers Union.
The local units of Standard Chartered Bank and Barclays Bank Plc offered staff voluntary severance packages, Ngandu added in an interview.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) is setting up an agency that will buy bad loans from lenders that run as high as 90 percent in some cases, Deputy Governor Kupikile Mlambo said in October.
With the central bank cancelling Allied Bank Ltd.’s licence last week and Tetrad Bank in talks with creditors, prospects for 2015 are gloomy for an industry once viewed as a haven for workers, the union’s Ngandu said.
“This year, the situation is not looking good at all, because 250 workers lost their jobs at Allied Bank,” he said.
“If the scheme of arrangement being negotiated at Tetrad Bank doesn’t materialize within the next 10 days, it means 130 workers will be jobless.
This year is going to be a very difficult year for the banking sector.”
The industry employed about 6,000 people as of last year, Ngandu said.
After the troubled Allied Bank, owned by transport minister Obert Mpofu surrendered its licence, the central bank is understood to have stepped up monitoring of at least two more institutions.
Four key foreign institutions – Standard Chartered, Barclays, Standard Bank and Nedbank – have interests in the local banking industry.
The foreign owned banks are stable, after adopting prudent lending measures.
But the locally-owned institutions have been struggling under the weight of liquidity constraints and a runaway non-performing loans ratio.
In the past two years, at least two other banks, Interfin Bank and another one in which Environment Minister Saviour Kasukuwere was said to have an interest in, have folded up.
Economists have called on the central bank to step up monitoring of the fragile industry and close struggling banks to protect depositors’ funds.
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