GAC Motor, Lotus Bank sign new vehicle financing pact

• Raise prospect for more new automobile purchases

GAC Motor appears determined to encourage more people in Nigeria to buy new vehicles for both personal/family ride and commercial purposes as it has entered into a partnership with Lotus Bank to make new vehicle acquisition easier and more affordable to all prospective auto patrons nationwide.

The scheme, ‘Rent to Win’, the two organisations said, was aimed at reducing the number of used vehicles on Nigerian roads.

Chairman, CIG Motor (franchise owners of the GAC brand in Nigeria), Chief Diana Chen, while speaking at the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Lagos, said that the partnership with Lotus Bank is designed to enable customers to acquire new vehicles in a financially convenient manner with comfortable repayment plans.

Chen explained that the scheme is a special one to willing clients and reiterated that it would be executed with the sincerity of purpose it deserves.

According to her, customers who qualified for purchase of the brands could pay back between 36 to 48 months.

She said, “The agreement we have is unique and you can’t get it anywhere else. This is a special scheme we are offering to the public. With this agreement we are signing today, Nigerians would not need to bring out their entire money to buy a vehicle at once.”

Executive Director, Lotus Bank, Alhaji Alhassan Abdulkarim expressed delight at the agreement between the two organisations.

Abdulkarim explained that since the bank was established less than a year ago, it was the first time it was signing such an agreement with any automobile company in Nigeria and expressed optimism that it had the capacity to finance the scheme.

He emphasised that as a bank, the major action of the bank is to engage in financial intermediation with clients and promised that any client who approaches the bank for acquisition of the any GAC Motors model, such request would be granted within 48 hours.

He however said that such customers must meet the procedures spelt out by the bank, which include domiciling of their salary accounts with the bank and for businessmen; they must show evidence of continuous payments as agreed with the bank.

He said, “We have the capacity to finance as much of this scheme as possible despite the fact that we are just eight months in the financial sector. So far, we have 15 branches across the country.

“As at today, we have about N13 billion capital, which is the capital of a national bank for instance. If any organization wants to acquire 1,000 of these vehicles, we have the capacity to finance such an entity.”

Also speaking at the signing ceremony, General Manager, Commercial, CIG Motor, Jibril Arogundade, recalled that the automobile company had the same agreement with some financial institutions earlier and described the experience as successful for the automobile industry.