Residents of the Sherikat neighborhood in Juba can now access banking services after the Kush Bank opened a branch in the area on Wednesday.
The chairperson of the Board of Directors of Kush Bank Limited, Armando Massimiliano Sirolla, spoke at the branch launch ceremony.
“We are here today to launch the first branch of Kush Bank on this side of the city Sherikat. We are very pleased to be the first one, we are very pleased because we want to not just make money we also want to contribute to the community and we want to champion access to finance and financial inclusion in South Sudan,” he said.
He revealed that they have launched a product that enables all their customers to access banking services without deposit or withdrawal charges.
“From 1st December 2022, we launched the no banking fees at Kush Bank which means everyone can bank with us and we making sure that the fees are at zero and why we do this to improve access, to have more people coming to us, and of course increase our deposit,”
For his part, Chan Andrea Chan, the Director for Bank Supervision at the Bank of South Sudan said they are revisiting their policies to improve access to banking services for every citizen.
Andrea noted that South Sudan has the lowest access to financial and banking services in the region with only 8 percent of the population having access to banking services.
“We have embarked on a lot of things including revisiting some of our laws that are governing the banking sector, currently there is an ongoing process where the central bank is amending some key legislation including the Bank of South Sudan act and the banking act, these are important legal frameworks that govern how the financial sector in the country,” Andrea said.