Dr Samuel Salia, Faculty of Social Sciences

Dr Samuel Salia is the Programme Director for the MSc. International Banking and Finance course at the University of Wolverhampton. Dr Salia has a PhD in Finance and a Masters in Financial and Legal Management. He also leads and teaches on International Financial Institutions and Markets; International finance and; International Investment and Portfolio Management. He is a member of the UK Institute of Consulting and a fellow member of the UK Higher Education Academy.

Dr Salia has published on issues on bank finance. Furthermore, he is conducting collaborative research on diaspora bonds, financial regulation, competition, risk and credit score tools. Dr Salia regularly presents papers at national and international conferences and engages in research with colleagues from UK universities.

Reaching the hard to reach: Providing bottom of the pyramid entrepreneurs access to bank finance through building a credit score tool:

Traditional banks lack crucial information about borrowers at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) due to challenges in information gathering; this impacts credit decision-making of banks. Towards this end, agency theory, which focuses on the principal-agent relationship, is important in understanding the significance of promoting confidence and reinforcing trust between lenders and borrowers. As a result of information asymmetries between banks and BoP entrepreneurs, and differing motives, banks lack trust in the BoP and may therefore need an assessment mechanism to build up and/or reinforce this trust. This implies that a lack of approach to assess BoP creditability is a key barrier against bank lending.

This study draws on the role and importance of agency relationship to assess the creditability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) in Ghana and the effectiveness of that relationship in deepening access to financial services for a broad range of low-income people. In this regard, the aim of this study is to analyse the key constraints that the BoP entrepreneurs encounter when applying for bank finance and to provide a credit score tool.