The Chief Executive Officer of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), Seth Twum-Akwaboah, has called on members of the association to scale up electronic means of transacting business in the wake of the COVID-19.

He said the electronic business transaction should not be abandoned by members because that is the new normal.

He told Joy News that: “As far expectation is concerned, for us we want business to continue as usual. We are aware that as a result of the COVID-19 situation, businesses have really slowed down and it’s true with banking transactions as well so, therefore, it’s affecting businesses in general.

“The problem we have is that the large sector of our members is SMEs, and when you have a lot of SMEs and you are dealing with SMEs, electronic business is affected a little bit.

“So in this situation much as we want business to continue in a normal way for us, we know that most of our SME businesses do not that electronic means of working very efficiently. So that is going to be a bit of a challenge.”

Mr. Twum-Akwaboah added, “But apart from that a lot of our big companies our business is also electronic-based and therefore we think that it is very possible to do business around that. We are transacting business on a regular basis using electronic means and therefore that should continue.

“There are different aspects of our business, one is the cash collection that the banks would do. That one can go on, I don’t think we will have problems with that.

“The other aspect is to do with loans and other transactions, those ones I don’t see how the COVID situation should affect it significantly because a lot of the transaction is done on phone, it is paperwork…”