The President of Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria (MBAN), Niyi Akinlusi has revealed how important this year’s MBAN CEOs retreat is for the mortgage banking sub sector.
While speaking to Africa Housing News during the 3-day Mortgage Banking Sub-sector CEOs’ annual retreat in Lagos which held from November 29 – December 01, 2019, Akinlusi said the yearly event is intended to review the industry and see what needs to be done.
‘’Yearly we come together to discuss the industry and we are always happy to have regulators participating in it as well. This year we have the CBN, NDIC, NMRC, FMBN, key stakeholders of the mortgage banking industry, secondary mortgage financial institutions and all other important stakeholders in the sub sector
According to him, this year’s retreat is about three major things. These are issues that have to do with digitalisation, capacity building and management succession.
This is what informed the theme ‘’Critical Success Factors for Continuity and Viability of the Mortgage Banking Sub-Sector in Nigeria: Mortgage Digitization, Human Capacity Development and Management Succession.’’
‘’For digitisation, we realise that because of the population of Nigeria with over 75% of Nigerians employed or self-employed in the informal sector, we must find ways to reach out to these people and it is through digitisation of our services. That’s why it is a critical area for us, particularly because we have a uniform underwriting standard for informal sector and self-employed. We must digitise our services and operations so that we can reach out to them and we can bring those people whom have been left behind in home ownership back in. For a country of 22 million housing deficit, we have a lot to do and a lot of our people are self-employed and living on their own,’’ he said.
The second issue that the retreat focuses on according to him is the issue of human capacity development.
‘’We also realise that for the sustainability of the industry, we must find a way to ensure we constantly retool and retrain our staff and let them know about the latest developments in the issue of mortgage underwriting and customer management, and of course all the latest developments through IT and AI. We need to also train our people on things like machine learning because if they don’t understand what’s happening around them there is no way they can use those tools,’’ he said.
Akinlusi also said that the issue of management succession in the sub sector is one of major concern for the retreat.
‘’We are at the critical point in our history where we must breed people to take over the industry. We must ensure each mortgage bank as part of corporate governance principle have a plan for management succession in a way that it does not disrupt the activities of the company. That is why it is an area we are discussing,’’ he said.
The event featured top rated paper presentations on a variety of topics from several leaders in the sector.
