The Financial Institutions Training Centre has urged mortgage finance institutions in the country to convert their challenges to opportunities in order to move the economy forward.

The centre expressed its readiness to partner the umbrella body of mortgage banks in the country, the Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria, to boost the performance of mortgage finance institutions in the country.

The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, FITC, Dr. Lucy Newman, who stated this, noted that mortgage banks would contribute immensely to the Gross Domestic Products in the next decade.

Newman spoke at the 11th edition of MBAN/FITC 2017 continuous education programme for directors of mortgage banks in Lagos recently.

The CEO observed that the collaborative effort between the two organisations had yielded positive outcome.

The two-day programme with five technical sessions, had the theme “Enhancing board leadership: Sustaining a culture of performance for development and growth.”

In her opening remarks, Newman hoped that the topics for discussions at the two-day event would go a long way to strengthen the institution plagued by finance and funding issues.

She said, “Working with the MBAN over the past 10 years has been a very good journey. We can take that because from the FITC, we can see the flow of the trend of things that we have discussed. We have seen how the industry has mutated over time and we can tell the impact on some of the organisations.

At the first technical session, Director, Other Financial Institutions, CBN, Mrs. Tokunbo Martins, who spoke on the topic, “Mortgage banking: A catalyst for growth in Nigeria,” said with the existence of a huge vacuum and available value chain in the sector, there was opportunity to do much more.

Martins said, “As directors who are ultimately responsible for the progress and sustainability of our banks, our challenges are going to be viewed as threats or opportunities to explore and break boundaries that can see our mortgage sector contributing 20 to 40 per cent of our nation’s Gross Domestic Products in the next 10 years.

She noted that the review of the entire mortgage value chain had been “a report card of suboptimal performance.”

“But the present weaknesses also show opportunities as several sectors in the value chain are presently not or under-explored,” she added.

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