Central bank readies team to run growing reserves |20 July 2011

The target is to ensure Seychelles has enough foreign exchange covering all kinds of imports needed over a period of three months, but efforts will in fact be made to exceed that, said deputy governor Caroline Abel of the Central Bank of Seychelles on Monday.

She was speaking to Nation at Le Meridien Barbarons resort where human resources managers from the central banks of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries are discussing their staff’s training needs and plans.

Gross international reserves now stand at US $250 million.

Ms Abel said the growing reserves need to be run by qualified people and efforts to train managers for that are under way.

“We have put more emphasis in reserve management training because the central banking is growing the reserve. We have to manage that portfolio as well so we have to train staff further because previously there were hardly any reserves to manage.

“The reserves were low before so we did not really need people in that sector but we now have to invest in getting a pool of reserve managers,” she said.

She said the bank also needs to train more staff in human resource management to meet growing demands.

“We are seeing a whole change in the way we are doing our training.”

Training as a whole for the bank’s 125 workers has changed, said Ms Abel, adding the bank has a bigger supervisory role.

“We have enhanced our supervision framework and the payment system, which we are modernising.