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| Chairman, CIG Motors, Chief Diana Chen (right) and Executive Director of Lotus Bank, Alhaji Alhassan Abdulkarim, at the Auto Finance Scheme signing ceremony in Lagos |
The scheme, ‘Rent to Win’, the two
organisations said, is aimed at reducing the number of used vehicles on
Nigerian roads.
Chairman, CIG Motors (franchise owners of
the GAC brand in Nigeria), Chief Diana Chen, while speaking at the signing of
the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Lagos, said that the partnership with
Lotus Bank is designed to enable customers to acquire new vehicles in a
financially convenient manner with comfortable repayment plans.
Chen explained that the scheme is a special
one to willing clients and reiterated that it would be executed with the
sincerity of purpose it deserves.
According to her, customers who qualified
for purchase of the brands could pay back between 36 to 48 months.
According to her, “the agreement we have is
unique and you can’t get it anywhere else. This is a special scheme we are
offering to the public. With this agreement we are signing today, Nigerians
would not need to bring out their entire money to buy a vehicle at once”.
Executive Director, Lotus Bank, Alhaji
Alhassan Abdulkarim expressed delight at the agreement between the two
organisations.
Abdulkarim explained that since the bank
was established less than a year ago, it was the first time it was signing such
an agreement with any automobile company in Nigeria and expressed optimism that
it had the capacity to finance the scheme.
He emphasised that as a bank, the major
action of the bank is to engage in financial intermediation with clients and
promised that any client who approaches the bank for acquisition of the any GAC
Motors model, such request would be granted within 48 hours.
He, however, said that such customers must
meet the procedures spelt out by the bank, which include domiciling of their
salary accounts with the bank and for businessmen; they must show evidence of
continuous payments as agreed with the bank.
He said: “We have the capacity to finance
as much of this scheme as possible despite the fact that we are just eight
months in the financial sector. So far, we have 15 branches across the country.
“As at today, we have about N13 billion
capital, which is the capital of a national bank for instance. If any
organization wants to acquire 1,000 of these vehicles, we have the capacity to
finance such an entity.”
Also speaking at the signing ceremony,
General Manager, Commercial, CIG Motors, Jibril Arogundade, recalled that the
automobile company had same agreement with some financial institutions earlier
and described the experience as successful for the automobile industry.