Addressing the participants at the opening ceremony of the just ended Ghana- Togo -Benin - Nigeria Business summit, Mr Gabriel Edgal stated that “it is much easier to transfer funds from Togo, Benin or Ghana to Europe and the United States than it is to transfer funds between the four COPAZ countries.   As a consequence, he continued “the amount of funds that are physically transferred across the borders as a cannot be fathomed. The many physical barriers, i am afraid are rather encouraging money laundering across the borders which is a huge loss to the formal banking sector and revenue lost to government”. He emphasized.

He further mentioned that due to the seemingly inconvertible nature of the local currencies, payments for goods and services are made in foreign currency thus putting undue pressure on a country’s reserves. “This should not be acceptable” he insisted.  “We must encourage convertibility amongst our currencies if we are to achieve any form of financial integration” he added.

Mr Edgal in conclusion opined that “Banks must create the settlement platform for trade across our borders by facilitating settlement in local currency between all market participants, customers and banks thus reducing the huge requirement for foreign exchange”.

The summit which served as an arena for networking for partnerships and learning about the various opportunities in the four countries both as individual nations and as one contiguous bloc for business was organized by Vintage Visions with UBA as the lead sponsor.