The long awaited credit bureau programme that has now become well known and talked about in Uganda has finally been launched and will now become a reality in the lives of thousands of Ugandans.

At the official launch of the credit bureau and financial card ID services in Uganda on 3 December 2008, Compuscan’s MD, Michael Malan, presented the Governor of the Bank of Uganda with the first official financial sector ID card.

Remo Lenisa , the Group CEO of Compuscan Information Technologies of which Compuscan Uganda is a subsidiary company, adds that “with our first establishment in Uganda we have a strategic vision to enter the entire African region using Uganda as a base. We have always enjoyed the warm welcome we receive in Uganda and particularly we recognise with appreciation the way the Bank of Uganda (BOU) has worked with us in this true private sector/ public sector partnership.”

Besides providing critical services to the financial sector, Compuscan also assists BOU with quality credit information to assist in strengthening banking supervision in Uganda.

Compuscan will provide detailed reports regarding sectoral risk classifications, credit concentration, credit quality as well as assisting BOU with breakdowns of credit information by product type, age of borrower, gender breakdowns and more. The better the quality of information reported, the better will be the information produced.

Banks have already exceeded the 3 million mark of the number of records submitted to Compuscan and this number is now expected to grow monthly by more than a million records as information is submitted to Compuscan. Reflecting on the year of 2008, Malan (MD in Uganda), remembers the easy months of data discussions, agreeing on layouts and formats and then obtaining the first extracts. “This process is the most misunderstood part of any bureau setup in a new country and it requires specialised skills and experience to meet with regulations, and banks’ IT departments to discuss and intervene to try and introduce a balance between what is reasonable versus what is truly achievable.”

Ugandan Bank’s have set themselves some very high goals in this regard to satisfy the requirements of the Bank of Uganda, but have done so wisely. Data will be supplied to the credit bureau in stages where the first area of focus will be to get the system and the file format structures correct. If data files cannot be read or interpreted no one can make sense of the information, so this is a wise departure point. With the assistance of BOU, who established the guidelines and issued the ‘rules of the game’, banks have two further dates by which deadlines in data quality must be achieved. After these reasonable deadlines have been passed, penalties will be applied.

Remo Lenisa (Group CEO) adds that “this third party assistance does go a long way to getting action in data sharing” and cited a few examples in Africa where credit bureaus are unable to get going due to the lack of commitment from the third party.

“Our approach is always to work in an industry with the law workers and the users of the services to ensure that everyone is able to reach a level of harmony in projects of this nature.

Once the data is collected, the Compuscan services will come into own and true risk models and ‘first world’ value added services can be considered.

It is at this point where the banks, MDI’s and borrowers in Uganda will see the benefits.”

We are pleased to be a significant part of this milestone event in the development of Uganda’s Banking System and we look forward to a long and mutually beneficial partnership in the years to come.