Bank home-owner scheme approved in Malawi

The bank's head of Personal and Business Banking Department, Douglas Kamwendo, said the product has filled a huge gap in the products the bank has been offering to its clients in Malawi.

“This scheme would be affordable as it would be providing up to 20 years as the maximum repayment period,” said Kamwendo.

The bank met its corporate clients and other customers in Malawi's commercial city of Blantyre where it sold the scheme a few days after launching it in the capital Lilongwe.

A Malawi government official who attended the meeting said government has been facing pressure from the public to provide land and residential houses.

“Demand for housing accommodation in Malawi has reached an alarming rate,” declared the official, Fletcher Zenengeya who is the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Lands, Physical Planning and Surveys.

He said as somebody from a government department that deals with land and residential housing issues, he welcomes the Standard Bank initiative.

“Government alone cannot cope up with the pressure due to limited and other factors,” he said.

Kamwendo said although the bank is introducing the scheme in Malawi for the first time, it has been doing it as Standard Bank Group.

“By 2006, we had over K3.4 trillion (R170bn) of home loans in our books,” said Kamwendo adding that this shows that the bank is good at these loans.

He said initially, the scheme will be open to clients under the Executive Banking Suite with a monthly income of at least K500,000 and those from corporate organizations.

“The former will be able to access up to K10 million with the latter entitled to a loan of K1.2 million,” he explained, before adding that those in private businesses will also access the loans.

The Malawi government official observed that there are a few institutions offering such facilities and it is too expensive to service the loans.

“You actually hang yourself if you go for it,” he said “but with many players coming in, it will now be cheaper to get a housing loan and I hope this new facility will be affordable.”

Zenengeya then said the onus is now on government to speed up the process of providing title deeds which currently take ages before a complete processing.”