Mr. Augustine Simons
Head of the Ghana Fixed Income Market (GFIM), Augustine Simons has urged Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) to turn to the bond market for financing.
Speaking at a workshop to educate journalists on the operations of the bond market and the GFIM in Accra, he said the bond market provides better options for long-term financing for businesses.
According to him, growth in corporate bond issuance has been pronounced in Ghana since the establishment of GFIM in May 2015 by key stakeholders in the financial market.
Mr. Simons named the stakeholders as the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), Bank of Ghana (BoG), Central Securities Depository Ghana Limited (CSD), Ghana Association of Bankers, the Ministry of Finance, Financial Market Association (ACI Ghana) and Licensed Dealing Members (LDMs) of the Ghana Stock Exchange.
“There are eight corporate institutions that currently have active debt instruments on the market with tenors ranging from 5years to 10years,” he noted and added that these corporate issuers are in the areas of finance, energy and education.
On Government securities, the GFIM Head revealed that as of the end of June 2022, there were three benchmarked securities which have seven-year, 10-year and 15-year tenors in the market
He added that the market again has 50 non-benchmarked bonds with tenors from 3 years to 20 years, twelve (12) two-year notes, and sixty-nine (69) 91-day to 364-day bills.
“There are four local US dollar bonds (3-year & 5-year). The market takes into consideration nine (9) Eurobonds,” he explained.
Performance
On the performance of the GFIM since inception, 5,222,319,227 series of volume were traded in 2015 and shot up to 124,072,411,987 series of volume trade in 2022, pointing out that the trade volumes were high last year at 208,807,923,727.
Mr. Simons elucidated there is a high turnover at the bond market, and called on the public to patronize it for safe investment.
The workshop was organised by the Institute of Financial Journalists (IFEJ) in collaboration with the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE).
By Ernest Kofi Adu