Barely a week ago, the blue bank launched the country’s first ever digital one minute loan from the comfort of its clients phones or mobile devices, Zambia’s most profitable and largest bank by asset size, Stanbic is at it again unveiling an energy finance solution to the copper producers energy crisis dubbed yasha mailiti at the Alternative Energy expo last week. Yasha mailiti is a vernacular term meaning switch on your lights.
Being a client centric financial institution, Stanbic is thinking about its customer base and how extended load management has impacted them given the currency power bottlenecks the country has as a consequence of climate change.
Speaking at the expo, Marketing Head Perry Siame said there was need for the private sector to compliment the government in devising solutions that will help mitigate effects of extended load management. The government has undertaken to import 300MW of energy from South Africa’s Eskom to help plug an 872MW power gap. Being a partner to the government in Zambia’s growth agenda, Stanbic has structured a solution through its asset finance unit to fund for 12-36 months alternative solutions such as vanilla solar or hybrid type of power backups.
The bank is offering upto 24 months for generators and 12-60 months for solar inverters or hybrid solutions which clients are free to shop around with suppliers while the bank worries about funding the solutions.
Zambia grapples with a deepening crisis given receding water levels are its key dams and water bodies weighing energy generation adversely.
The Kwacha Arbitrageur
