Bank of PNG still assessing banking licence for Tisa: Pidik

Business

By PETER ESILA
THE Bank of Papua New Guinea is still assessing the banking licence application by Teachers Savings and Loan Society (Tisa), Bank of PNG assistant governor Elision Pidik says.
Tisa chief executive officer Michael Koisen said last week that currently there was a duopoly in the market and there was a need for more players in the retail banking space.
Pidik said applying for a banking licence was a difficult process.
“Applying for a banking licence is difficul because commercial banking means that you will be able to do transactions domestically and also overseas between PNG and other countries, so that means that there needs to be a relationship with other banks overseas to be able to facilitate transactions across the board between PNG and international, so we call it correspondence banking,” he said.
“We receive the application and there is some discussion between the bank and the management and board of Tisa on basically the priority areas.
“One of the priority areas is to identify and start working on the relationships with corresponding banks with international banks, these are multinational banks, vast banks across the globe, from large countries like the United States, Australia, Japan Singapore, UK, Europe, so that is a very important requirement to be able to move towards complying with that requirement to get the licence, so it is a very hard.
“We are encouraging Tisa to also look at other options like maybe working with other institutions who want to move in that direction to translate their organisations to commercial banking so that you move the resources, synergies, into the operations.
“There are many other areas that we have asked Tisa board and management to make, they are like prerequisites that you have to have in place before we move with the application.”