At the time that banking started in 1896 in Ghana, very little time could have been devoted to banking education those far-off days.

In 1963, however, the need for banking education began to register on the minds of the far-sighted. In that year the Accra Local Centre of the British Institute of Bankers was opened to serve as a liaison between the bankers who were trained in Great Britain on the one hand and banking students who were taking the British qualification on the other.

The Accra Local Centre was more or less a club for bankers who had returned home after their training abroad on government scholarships awarded them immediately after the country attained independence. Its main function was to provide a forum for these bankers to exchange ideas and interact regularly.

The programmes therefore included mainly symposia, lectures, and social activities like the annual bankers’ dinner. The Local Centre at the time had no staff and its activities were organised by volunteers and the financial needs of the Centre were thus minimal.

The idea was not to create an institution which could offer training for the acquisition of the professional banking qualification although it remained part of its aim to promote the acquisition of the banking qualification for bank workers.

In due course, programmes involving the organisation of evening classes and a library were added to the activities of the Local Centre with a view to assisting young bankers who were studying towards the examinations of the Chartered Institute of Bankers in UK to pass their examinations.

The Local Centre further toyed with the idea of establishing a banking school because at that point in time Ghana started experiencing balance of payment difficulties and therefore opportunities for scholarships for the training of Ghanaian bankers in Great Britain had started to recede.

So in 1966, a committee under the chairmanship of a Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, was appointed to look into the possibility of establishing a school to offer full-time education to the many bank employees. After many months of deliberations, the Committee could not come out with a report.

What may seem plausible from the inability of the Committee to issue a report was the difficulty in resolving the problem of offering full-time education for the staff and at the same time keeping bank work running smoothly without interruption. In those days distance education, as is known today, was not quite so popular.

The question of a banking school was therefore left in abeyance and no meaningful progress was made on this issue for a long time although from time to time voices were raised in the local press and other fora for the establishment of a banking college.

The Chief Executive, launching a CIB Ghana Workbook

The Institute itself started taking the form of a regular organisation when it registered under the Professional Bodies Decree in 1980.

It also started gradually to strengthen its capacity to take over the conduct of the Associateship examinations from the London Institute.

To begin with, it took over the conduct of the Stage I examinations in 1978 when the Institute in London linked the Stage I to the BTEC which was a business qualification that students in Polytechnics in Britain took to qualify to enter the Finals of the banking qualification.

This qualification was not available to Ghanaians and that was the reason why the Local Centre took the decision to conduct examinations at that stage.

The localisation process was completed in 1993 with the drawing up of the syllabus to conform to local demands.