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Global Access Savings & Loans in the year 2010 served over 300,000 customers with US$130m in foreign remittance payments, contributing immensely to directing foreign exchange flows into the country. Since the company�s inception in 2000, its prime business has been to provide the Western Union Money Transfer service at all its 14 dedicated locations within Accra, Tema and Kumasi. It also recently added Moneygram and Vigo money transfer services to its offering. These were made known by the Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Emmanuel Osei Owusu, during the official opening of the Kwadaso branch of Global Access Savings & Loans Limited in Kumasi last week. This brings to four the number of branches currently operational in the Kumasi metropolis, adding to Bantama, Old Tafo, and Manhyia branches. As part of the company�s continuous effort to improve its customers� experience, in 2008, when it applied for a non-bank financial institution licence from the Bank of Ghana to operate as a savings & loans company, its management put structures in place to enable a smooth migration onto the savings and loans platform. According to the CEO, when the licence was finally granted by the Central Bank in June 2009, it did not take much for the company to immediately commence full operations as a savings & loans company. He stated that the remittance service has become a delivery vehicle for the savings and loans business, since management of the company sees it as an opportunity and potential for turning their remittance customers into instant customers of the savings and loans operation. Serving mainly the economically active and informal unbanked population, Global Access Savings & Loans offers tailored products to suit the informal, unbanked category of the business population. In the company�s quest to develop an enhanced range of services for its customers, a strategy of mopping-up the substantial float of unbanked deposits has yielded about GH�11m in just five months, about ten thousand customers within the same period, and loans granted up to GH�1.5m. Global Access Savings & Loans provides credit to low-income and small- and medium-scale enterprises, and is poised to increase its share by utilising microfinance methodologies such as moving the unbanked into banking by saving -- which will position them to access small loans. The Company also used the occasion to inaugurate the �Global Cash Domestic Money Transfer�, a service that is designed for customers to send money to their relations within Ghana through Global Access branches.