Rapheal John-Lall

The Agri­cul­ture De­vel­op­ment Bank (ADB) has dis­bursed more than $50 mil­lion in loans in the first five months of the fi­nan­cial year, Sheivan Ram­nath, CEO of the ADB said.

He said this rep­re­sent­ed 101 per cent of the bank's bud­get­ed tar­get while its to­tal ap­provals ex­ceed­ed $55 mil­lion or 97 per cent of bud­get­ed tar­get, he re­vealed when he spoke at the launch of the ADB's on­line bank­ing ser­vice and SMS tex­ting on­line pro­gramme, e-agr, at the Trinidad Hilton and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

ADB cus­tomers will be able to use the on­line bank­ing sys­tem to view their ac­count bal­ances, pay loans from sav­ings ac­counts, move funds be­tween ac­counts and re­quest state­ments.

Ram­nath said the bank has to change to move with the times and is re­brand­ing its prod­ucts and ser­vices while de­vel­op­ing and im­ple­ment­ing new ones.

"The ADB will con­tin­u­ous­ly ex­plore ways to en­sure that its man­date of serv­ing farm­ers of our na­tion is met and while this in­volves pro­vid­ing af­ford­able fi­nanc­ing to these agri-en­tre­pre­neurs, we are com­mit­ted to do­ing so in a con­ve­nient, time­ly, cost ef­fec­tive man­ner dri­ven by tech­nol­o­gy," he said.

"Our in­ten­tion is to make the bank avail­able to our clients at their con­ve­nience while as­sist­ing them in util­is­ing their avail­able time for max­i­mum ben­e­fit," he said.