Deposit Protection Fund now able to pay 20.9 million accounts
Depositors can now be paid within a month in the event of collapse of their financial institution. Photo / File
What you need to know:
- The 20.9 million accounts represent 98 percent of the 21.4 million accounts currently held by the entire banking sector
The Deposit Protection Fund (DPF) has indicated that deposits of at least 20.9 million account holders are now insured and can fully be paid in the unlikely failure of the banking system.
While presenting a status update of the DPF at a media breakfast sensitisation meeting in Kampala at the weekend, Mr Patrick Ezaga, the DPF director communications, said the Fund had developed enough capacity to at least pay 20.9 million accounts out of the 21.4 million accounts in the banking sector in case of any failures.
However, he indicated that it was very unlikely that the banking system would experience such a huge failure that would warrant payment of such a large number of accounts.
The 20.9 million accounts, according to DPF, represents a coverage of 98 percent, of which every account is insured by a sum of Shs10m.
The 2 percent deposits, which are not covered under DPF, hold large amounts, whose settlement can only be handled by the Central Bank at the level of liquidation.
The DPF, which is now a separate entity from Bank of Uganda, has been building capacity and innovations that currently enables it to pay up to date depositors within or less than a month in the event of collapse of a financial institution.
The DPF largely generates its income from annual members’ premiums, which currently stand at a statutory rate of 0.2 percent of a financial institution’s deposit liabilities and investment income from government securities.
During his presentation, Mr Ezaga also indicated that the total value of insured deposits constitutes 18.9 percent of total deposits in the banking sector, which is Shs6.5 trillion out of the total Shs34.3 trillion as of September 31.
“The Fund can pay off 17.1 percent of total insured deposits in the sector, [which is] Shs1.102 trillion against Shs6.5 trillion,” he said, noting that the Fund currently has membership of 33 financial institutions , of which 25 are commercial Banks, four credit institutions and four micro-deposit taking institutions.
During the meeting, Ms Julia Clare Olima Oyet, the DPF executive director, said the insurance limit had been reviewed from Shs3m to Shs10m in 2019, as a way of restoring confidence in the banking sector.
“We all want a stable banking sector. When a bank fails, the impact is spread. We want to ensure that such scenarios don’t happen, but in the event that it happens, we want to be sure that every depositor [within out limit] is paid their money at the earliest opportunity,” she said.
The Deposit Insurance - initially developed out of the need to protect vulnerable, uninformed small depositors, gained global prominence during the 2007/8 financial crisis, which saw a number of depositors lose confidence in the financial sector.
