The loan you qualify for was decided months ago

A Ghanaian business can pay 11.03% or 33.58% for the same one-year facility. Our funding page shows all twenty-two banks and where each sits.

What it does not tell you is how to get into the cheap half. So we read every bank's published lending criteria to find out — and the answer is uncomfortable, because most of it is not about your business.

The requirement almost everyone publishes

You must already bank with them.

Not a document, not a ratio, not a plan. A history.

Access Bank requires an account with them for at least six months before their Instant Business Loan is available at all.

Fidelity measures nearly everything through their own account. Their semi-secured overdraft requires annual credit turnover of GH¢200,000 in your operational account with Fidelity Bank, and existing customers need a minimum six-month relationship. The facility itself is capped at a percentage of your average monthly credit turnover over the past six months — 90% for the overdraft, 80% for the term loan.

Stanbic, Absa and First National all specify six months of bank statements, and each frames it as something new customers must supply — which is the same requirement seen from the other side.

So the loan you can get in March was substantially determined by what your account was doing in September.

What that means in practice

Shopping around at the point of need does not work. By the time a business knows it needs money, it cannot manufacture six months of turnover through a bank it has never used.

The practical version of the advice is unglamorous: if there is any prospect of borrowing in the next year, open the account now and run trade through it. The relationship is the qualification.

And it compounds. Fidelity's caps rise with tenure — up to GHS200,000 for a new client, GHS300,000 after a year, GHS500,000 for a good repeat borrower. The same business, the same accounts, three different answers depending only on how long it has been there.

The other published requirements

Time in business. Access requires at least one year. Fidelity asks one year's experience in the line of business for most facilities, two years for trade finance, and defines a start-up as six months of operation.

Turnover. Access sets an expected minimum annual turnover of GHS 400,000. Fidelity's thresholds run from GH¢100,000 to GH¢200,000 depending on the product. Republic Bank publishes a GHS 500,000 figure.

Security. Access requires stocks to be assigned as collateral. Fidelity's Boafo facility requires none, though a sole proprietorship needs a guarantor. Most banks say only that security is required, without saying what or how much.

Conduct. Fidelity's term loan specifies not more than three dud cheques in the last six months, and their festive facility asks for none in six to twelve months. This is the only Ghanaian bank we found publishing a conduct threshold you could actually check yourself.

And sector. Access states plainly that an applicant must be in the approved sectors. A business in the wrong one does not qualify at any turnover, and the list is not part of the criteria they publish.

What we could not establish

Whether meeting the criteria gets you the loan. Every bank reserves a credit assessment, and a business can satisfy every published requirement and still be declined. Requirements are a filter, not a decision.

Whether meeting them gets you the cheap rate. Nothing published connects eligibility to price. The 11.03% and the 33.58% may reflect different customer bases, different funding costs or different margins — Bank of Ghana's returns are averages across each bank's whole book and cannot separate them.

And what fourteen of the twenty-two banks require at all. Most publish product descriptions without criteria. Two — Fidelity and Access — publish enough for a business to assess itself before applying, which is the most useful thing either of them does for a prospective borrower.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The cheapest bank on our comparison publishes no SME criteria we could find, and appears not to market SME lending at all. Its low average may reflect a corporate book that happens to include some large businesses.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: the 11.03% may not be available to most Ghanaian businesses in any meaningful sense, and comparing it against the 33.58% may be comparing two different markets rather than two prices for the same thing.

We have asked the banks. Anything they send goes here, cited and dated.

What the 22 banks charge · What a loan would cost you