Customers who use DFCU Bank to access their salaries are wallowing in sorrow after the bank’s EFT system collapsed, leaving thousands Ugandans in a state of uncertainty.
Employees of several organisations that were paid as early as Friday last week had not had their accounts credited by Monday evening.
When distraught clients contacted DFCU, management responded that its EFT system had crashed and was being handled.
EFT is the Electronic Funds Transfer that banks use to effect account-to-account transactions. Though DFCU could not definitively give a timeline on when the system crash will be rectified, a source knowledgeable with the banking sector warned that the bank is suffering “excess customer stress”.
DFCU last year controversially acquired the assets and customers of Crane Bank, Uganda’s biggest commercial bank then, and banking sector experts warn that it has failed to manage Crane Bank’s huge customer base.
The defunct Crane Bank Limited is reported to have been sold at a mere Shs200 billion shillings, however, revelation indicate the Shs200 billion where for liabilities as the bank was taken for free.
The new revelation is that the Shs200 billion is ‘liability fees’ and this makes the whole transaction questionable in respect to the actual sale price.
More drama however ensued as DFCU Bank in mid-August announced net profits of Shs114 billion for the first half of 2017 year, up from Shs23 billion in the same period the preceding year, 2016. So this profit indicates the bank was sold and sound by the time it was given to DFCU. However, in the free market place, there value attached to the property but for CBL it this wasn’t the case.
The DFCU Bank attributed the profit majorly to the acquisition of Crane Bank: the company’s balance sheet jumped to Shs3.05trn as of June 2017, up from Shs1.8 trillion in December 2016, in just six months.
DFCU is partly owned by the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), a British government-owned company, together with Rabo Development from the Netherlands and NorFinance from Norway, who are shareholders in Arise B.V together with Norfund, a Norwegian government-owned Private Equity firm and FMO, the Dutch Development Bank.
DFCU Shareholding percentages
Arise BV 58.71 per cent
CDC Group of the United Kingdom 9.97 per cent
National Social Security Fund (Uganda) 7.69 per cent
Kimberlite Frontier Africa Naster Fund 6.15 per cent
2 undisclosed Institutional Investors 3.22 per cent
SSB-Conrad N. Hilton Foundation 0.98 per cent
Vanderbilt University 0.87 per cent
Blakeney Management 0.63 per cent
Bank of Uganda Staff Retirement Benefits Scheme 0.59 per cent
Retail investors 11.19 per cent
