The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is ramping up its efforts to tackle a key hurdle for businesses operating on the continent: verifying the trustworthiness of potential trading partners. Traditionally, verifying the identity and financial health of a prospective business partner requires a lengthy and complex due diligence process.
This challenge is amplified in Africa, where due diligence can be difficult or expensive to come by due to the diverse business landscapes across its 54 United-Nations-recognised countries and the scarcity of reliable data on African entities.
Recognising this bottleneck, Afreximbank is intensifying efforts to streamline due diligence procedures in Africa by investing in the continued growth of the MANSA Digital Initiative a customer due diligence online repository that became operational in 2020 and that has in less than five years grown into a trusted database with reliable information on more than 20,000 distinct African entities.
MANSA acts as a central hub for verified information on African businesses, including banks, corporations, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This one-stop shop has significantly simplified and expedited the due diligence process for businesses looking to trade with partners across the continent, says Maureen Mba, head of the initiative.
On the sidelines of the Afreximbank Annual Meetings in the Bahamas, Mba tells African Business that MANSA exists to eliminate the globally-perceived risk of doing business in Africa, reduce information asymmetry, reduce huge compliance costs and bolster investors confidence in the continent. The purpose of MANSA is to address the challenges that impede trade growth in Africa, particularly where they relate to customer due diligence (CDD) and know-your-customer (KYC) matters, she notes.
