Customers receiving help

BANK South Pacific (BSP) is assisting over 5,000 customers who are affected by the Covid-19 with either loan repayment holidays or interest only payments.
Chief executive officer Robin Fleming explained yesterday that individuals were given three-month loan repayment holidays while impacted businesses were allowed interest-only payments.
Fleming said the bank was in constant dialogues with its customers.
He said the bank was not only dealing with Papua New Guineans but a number of different businesses and different countries.
“The difference between a repayment holiday and interest-only payments, generally, the repayment holiday applies to individuals who have a personal loan or some form of instalment loan,” he said.
“A repayment holiday means, for example, if your personal loan is due to be repaid in December this year, the three-month repayment holiday means that you will not make any payments and the maturity date is pushed to March 2021.
“If you are not making any repayments after three months, you are still obligated to repay the loan in full and that occurs by pushing the maturity or expiry date back by three months.
“For businesses, most of the businesses the first approach was to offer businesses affected interest only and some of that has been by BSP relationship managers going and talking to our customers and some by the customers proactively contacting us.
“Some of those business sectors have been more severely affected than others, we have included an interest capitalisation component.
“This means that you don’t have to pay interest or the principal gets capitalised but you still ultimately have to repay the bank the total amount due plus the interest which has been capitalised.
“For some businesses, that will be three months, for those severely affected, it could be up to six months.”