Bard Santner unveils heavyweight diaspora board

After its launch last week amid a blaze of publicity, Bard Santner Microfinance Bank—which has ambitions of becoming the country’s first diaspora-focused financial institution tapping into the deep multibillion-dollar remittance market—has unveiled a multidisciplinary board of directors who have held senior roles at some of the world’s best-known banks, audit firms, and financial regulators.

The board aims to provide robust corporate governance oversight and secure depositors’ funds in a market where people have lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to mismanagement, corporate governance failures, and devastating cycles of economic meltdown and hyperinflation.

Strong corporate governance and strict protection of depositors’ funds are vital in the Zimbabwean financial market against a backdrop of a chequered history of systemic banking crises, owner-manager abuses, and a fragile macroeconomic environment affecting institutions big, medium, or small.

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