The Bank of Industry (BoI) has urged feed millers in agro business to access the N15 billion credit which has been lying fallow at the bank for a while now.
Executive Director of the bank, Waheed Olagunju made the call during Animal Feed Workshop held in Lagos.
He said the bank was ready to support such business owners on a sustainable basis so that the N15 billion lending target, lying fallow, could be put to good use.
“Funding is available to agro businesses especially those in the animal feed business’’, he stated.
According to Olagunju, BoI has the N15 billion lending target for the year, but people are not coming up to access it.
‘‘Animal feed is one of the clusters we are focusing under value chain development and we are ready to work with the agro businesses.
‘‘The bank is ready to work with our development partners like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ’’, the executive director said.
According to Olagunju, BoI is proactive and responsive to the needs of the agro business sector.
“The bank’s interest rate is 10 percent on the average while we have single digit interest rates in some cases’’, he said.
He also said that the bank would open more offices for consultations across the country.
“We have opened mores offices, from seven, now increased to 15 office outlets across the country for easy access of our services. We are also planning to increase our consultants to 300 before the end of the year’’, he stated.
Olagunju said that the BoI had also improved its loan processing period from minimum of six weeks to 48 hours.
He urged borrowers to be ICT-inclined to fast track the processing periods of their loans.
He hinted that they could process their loans online, using the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) customer portal.