Abena Amoah charges firms to list on stock market to grow to the next level

GSE, they focus on two things -access to capital and governance practices that insulate the company -ensures the company is there for the long term, attract the right investors and go through the di erent challenges that comes along.

Business stagnates from bank nancing

The GSE boss also explained that banks require transparency “if you don’t have collateral, transparency they will not give you the money, there is another set of investors called private equity angle fund -they will also support your business and that is where a lot of businesses begin to stagnate in Ghana, after they have grown with bank nancing to a certain level they don’t want to grow anymore.”

The CEO of the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), Abena Amoah, has asked more local businesses to consider listing on the stock market if they want to experience the next level of growth and transformational capital.

Speaking as one of the panelists on MTN Business Executive Series she said “The next level of growth comes from the capital market – we all talk about Dangote, a lot of his business has been funded by the capital market, all his businesses are listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, that is where you go for transformational capital. That is where you grow to become the next 100m, 100-year-old company. You grow to become a case study as Columbia Business did on the Nkulenu industries and that for us is the governance principle as well as the access to serious money because the cost of bank debts in Ghana cannot grow your business very far.”

This year’s Business Executive Series was on the theme “Building a Resilient Business in Challenging Economic Environment” and for the GSE CEO, building resilience represents longevity, adhering to good governance and taking advantage of the stock market to grow.

For her, some businesses and companies that have shown resilience and pivoted by changing their strategy, and stood the test of time have practiced good governance and incidentally been listed on the stock exchange, from Enterprise Insurance, Nkulenu, MTN Ghana, Stanchart Chartered Bank Ghana among others.

“If you want to survive -what kind of governance systems do you have in place, a governance that makes sure that you are not the only owner, only decision maker, co-mingling the company’s resources with yours, getting advice from other experience people, that ensures that your business goes through the times.

According to her at the

And for her the stock market has 35bn cedis pension funds available for investment. According to her NPRA has reviewed the composition, the investment guidelines “so today it is opened for investments in the kind of riskier businesses, and as I said the reason, they must be on the stock exchange is because of the governance requirement to give the partnerships the con dence that the funds will be well managed.”

Rosy Fynn, CEO of MasterCard Foundation indicated that to build a resilient business is to ensure that you have an accurate and good data “I think data is gold in the quest to be as resilience as possible and it comes with having approaches that make you a data centric entity in the good times, you don’t wait till the issue start to happen then you gure out what is going on, what the numbers look like, what customers are thinking… one of the key things into building resilience is actually planning for it ahead of time -ability to rise back up when issues happen, but it only happens if you have put in the work ahead of time -planning” she said.

The President of the Association of Ghana Industries

(AGI), Dr. Humphrey Anim-Darke says to build resilience has to do with resource sharing among partners in such turbulent business space -partnership.