GSE plans new credit window for businesses

The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) is to introduce a new market that will allow businesses to raise short-term funds to meet pressing needs.

The Managing Director of the GSE, Abena Amoah, told the Daily Graphic in an interview that GSE’s proposed commercial paper trading regime would allow large corporations the opportunity to issue, list and trade short-term promissory notes with maturity between 60 days and 180 days.

Ms Amoah said the window for commercial paper trading would be launched this year in furtherance of efforts to deepen liquidity for the private sector.

She described it as one of many innovations from the exchange to diversify the market and give businesses options when it came to accessing capital.

She was speaking to the paper in her maiden interview since her appointment last November as the first female MD of the GSE.  

Broad stakeholder approach

Ms Amoah said the development of the commercial paper market followed a broad stakeholder approach that involved consultations with key institutions and experts.

“One of the key things in diversification for us is adding new products and launching new markets.

 “It took a very broad stakeholder approach to develop the commercial paper,” she said, explaining that commercial paper was essentially a short-term corporate type bond where companies come and borrow working capital.

“We plan the launch this year and it would provide a new avenue for investors to invest, especially pensioners and their pension funds,” she said.

Rating

The GSE MD said to make the commercial paper market effective, it would require that the firms were rated. As a result, Ms Amoah said interested institutions must be willing to operate to strict governance standards.

“So we are being very careful about who we start with and that is one of the things we are looking at,” she said.

Repos

In addition to launching a commercial paper market, Ms Amoah said the GSE was also looking at broadening and deepening its repurchased agreement (repos) trading.

In that regard, she disclosed that the exchange had signed on to global governance platforms to govern how liquid transactions were undertaken in the market.

“We are one of the few countries in Africa that have done this significantly and so that is a big plus for us,” she said.

Headwinds

Commenting on last year’s performance, Ms Amoah said despite the challenges the economy faced last year, the GSE performed quite well.

She described last year as one of the best years of the bourse from when one examines the volume and value of trades for the year.

“We traded about 1.3 billion volume of shares valued at GH¢1.6 billion and that is over 200 per cent higher than what we traded in the same period in 2021.

“Most of the trades, of course, came from MTN Ghana as they were doing their localisation – selling down some of their shares,” she said.

Beyond that, the MD said the exchange also enjoyed increased trading in the new gold exchange-traded fund (ETF).

“It came out very strongly such that by the end of the year, it was our second most traded market,” she said, noting that the developments showed that the GSE often found some silver lining in every cloud that the economy experienced.