Former BoI boss reflects on successes

Former Managing Director of the Bank of Industry (BoI), Rasheed Olaoluwa, yesterday, reminisced on his tenure in the bank and how his team was able to reposition it for increased productivity.

In a lecture titled: “Corporate Transformation in Nigeria: My BOI Experience” delivered by him, he dwelt on how he was able to galvanise the bank’s executive committee members and propel them to excellent performance levels.

According to him: “The starting point was to mobilise all the staff to rally behind a set of vision and mission statements, which are noble enough to get everyone motivated. We hired KPMG Professional Services, who conducted a comprehensive diagnostic review following which strategic retreats were organised and by the end of 2014, a robust five-year Strategic Plan 2015-2019 was developed.

“Our vision was to be the most impactful development bank in Africa. We organised all our strategic initiatives along two broad objectives: (1) to make significant developmental Impact on Nigeria’s Real Sectors (by funding industrial projects and SMEs) and (2) to adopt Global best practices in Risk Management, Operations, Human Resources, Finance, etc.

“We defined development Impact in terms of how many projects in our targeted industrial sectors we are able to finance; the level of domestic value addition by funded projects; how many Nigerians are employed by those projects; the ability of the projects to source their raw materials locally, etc.”

He added that his team benchmarked BoI against leading Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) in emerging markets such as South Africa, Brazil, India Malaysia and Turkey. Besides, “we agreed specific milestones and set timelines for a wide range of strategic actions, which we designed to achieve the developmental Impact and Best Practice objectives from 2015 to 2019,” he said

Among other decisions taken to ensure improved services, was the establishment of Loan Monitoring and Loan Recovery Department, to provide oversight over the bank’s loan portfolio, provide remedial services and actively recover bad loans.

“To sensitize the public to the issue of bad loans, we blacklisted 23 companies who had perpetrated credit fraud (willful default, cloned title documents, etc) in the bank. The criminal cases were reported to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). On the flip side, we also recognised 10 customers who had consistently fully repaid their loans from BOI and inducted them into the BOI’s Hall of Fame,” he said.