Consider customers

THE National reported in the business section on Monday (March 2), the story “2019 successful year for BSP”.
Another good result for BSP as announced by the board chairman whereby consolidated operating profit was 5.5 per cent up from 2018 to K890.4 million.
Despite this good news for BSP, it must be highlighted to their executive management that their customer service levels generally is very poor.
Apart from very long queues in just about every branch each working day, another quickly emerging problem is their lack of support to SMEs.
Since beginning of 2018, a lot of SMEs in rural towns such as Bulolo have been asked to go through a long process to request for EFTPOS machines.
Some are still waiting to get one.
It is taking the bank almost over one year to deliver EFTPOS machines.
This issue is adversely affecting SMEs daily operations as they are losing business from card carrying customers and increasing their risks of theft as they carry cash on their premises.
While the Government is aggressively pushing for the growth of SMEs, BSP through such action is not helping to provide an enabling environment for this government initiative to progress to plan.
As the leading bank in the country, BSP has an important role in the financial markets to assist deliver key government initiatives such as growing the SME sector to levels where it becomes a significant component of the national economy.
So could the good chairman please also advise his management to seriously look at their support to SMEs in order to deliver on this important government initiative? In such tough economic times, every key stakeholder has their own little part to play in order to sustain our economy.
So could BSP look at this issue immediately to support the hard working rural SMEs?

Concerned Ples Man,
Morobe