Micro-Credit Company in Ghana: Competitive Advantages of WBI Micro-Credit Services

Godwin Binlinla, Founder and CEO of WBI Micro-Credit Services, explains what are WBI’s competitive advantages, compared to other micro-credit companies in Ghana.

“It is one of the areas that people normally did not take notice of until the banks were not willing to extend loans. We realized that the microfinances deal with small businesses. That is where they go to get their funds. But the small businesses are not in offices or the big areas, they are outside striving to make a living. In order to reach out to them, to even seek the deposit fund by them by the microfinances, you need to recruit people that will visit them from day to day. One of the things I realized was that the people that were being sent to the field to do this work were relegated. They were not given much attention. People in offices can be paid as much as 10 times what the person walking in sand, sweating, is. So, in order to be a unique entity when it comes to micro-crediting, I set up a unique system. We believe that money is not in offices, it is outside. If people are going outside, you have to make sure that you value them as much as the people sitting at a PC, that you give them the necessary tools, that you make transportation easier for them. We give special attention to our workforce, ensuring that people are being paid purely on their productivity instead of paying people based on their academic background. Sometimes the money that people received had not correlated to their productivity. I tried to match productivity against remuneration. If someone with a secondary school education performs more than a first-degree person, and the first-degree person gets paid twice as much, it indirectly discourages the first person. If they have the necessary ability to equally match up with the employee holding the degree, why are they not paid equally or more? I pay attention to my workers’ health. Here, when workers are sick, they go to the hospital, two of their children go to the hospital or their wife goes to the hospital, the company pays. We give them motorbikes to facilitate their field transportation which are fueled every week. These basic things are actually working. My competitors do not do this. They also do not give much attention to such workers. Because of that, the attrition rate in this job is high. People are employed and then they are gone. Some of them are in the process of giving loans or have given loans. If they resign, because they were dealing with their clients directly, you automatically end up having challenges in recovering that money. Here, we hardly encounter that because workers are being treated very well. Here, the offices are very quiet. The CEO and administration may step out, even my deputy is heading out for an interview right now. We have come to understand that money is not just in the offices or on papers, it is outside. For that reason, we must give the people that go outside the necessary premium, attention, and empower them to have that willingness to go there without necessarily thinking about going to an office to sit idle and wait for results that will never come. That is an area in which we have done very well. Currently, we have a total workforce of 118. Within a year, we rarely see even two of our employees resigning voluntarily. If we are not satisfied with your work, we will inquire and then let you go because we have set a standard that is very competitive. That makes us stand out against others. It also even compels our recovery rate to be as strong as it is because workers are given special attention, we empower them, they are well paid, everything has been done even better than what the government tells us to do and that makes us unique. It was a major challenge when it comes to the micro-crediting because other companies employ people and they see them as a non-entity that just goes outside and gets clients. Giving these people necessary attention has played to our advantage”, says Godwin Binlinla.

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