The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria has disbursed a sum of N234.2bn as mortgages, housing renovation loans and refunds to retirees.
According to the data obtained from the bank in Abuja on Friday, total mortgage loan disbursements by the organisation since inception was put at N193.4bn for 18,935 mortgages.
The total amount disbursed as home renovation loans by the bank was put at N17.5bn for 22,975 beneficiaries.
The bank further stated that the total amount which it had refunded to about 229,820 retirees who had exited its housing delivery scheme since the inception of the FMBN was N23.3bn.
The Managing Director, FMBN, Ahmed Dangiwa, said the bank had also initiated housing products that were tailored to tackle housing affordability challenge for contributors to the National Housing Fund.
Dangiwa outlined some of the initiatives to include the rent-to-own scheme, where contributors could own a home by monthly or yearly rents over a 30-year period, and the NHF Individual Housing Construction loans that were payable over a 15-year period at an interest rate of seven per cent.
According to him, the reduction of equity contribution requirements for accessing NHF loans from 10 to zero per cent for sums of up to N5m and 20/30 per cent to 10 per cent for loans of up to N15m, was another initiative that would help workers get their own homes.
The FMBN boss said the bank would continue ongoing efforts to fully automate its business operations to improve efficiency and timeliness in the delivery of its services to Nigerian workers.
Dangiwa said a key component of this strategic policy was achieving end-to-end automation of all its operations ranging from NHF collection, loan processing, issuance of a statement of accounts, and NHF refunds, among others.
He, however, stated that the management of the bank was not unaware of some critical challenges facing the NHF scheme.
He noted that some of the challenges arose from employers who either failed to remit totally or only partially their workers’ NHF deductions to FMBN, employers failing to provide schedules of deductions, among others.
“It also became apparently clear that it was high time that the FMBN joined the league of technology-savvy institutions and its peer of financial institutions that have adopted Information Technology as the standard mode of service delivery to customers,” Dangiwa added.
He noted that the realisation and the need to demonstrate accountability and transparency in the management of the NHF led to the adoption of a strategic goal to achieve fully automated end-to-end IT business processes in the bank.
-PUNCH