Ghana: Stanbic Bank Strengthens Support For SMEs

_ghanaweb.com

Stanbic Bank Ghana has indicated its readiness to scale up its support for Small and Medium Scale enterprises in the country in the form of special products and services.

This was made known by the Executive Head of Personal and Business Banking, Nana Benneh at a Thought Leadership and Enterprise Banking Activation summit held at the bank’s headquarters in Accra.

The conference was organized to enable the bank and some SME’s interact and share ideas on how to increase services and lend more support to their SME clients. He said that the bank has products and services tailored for the SME’s and are ready to offer any form assistances to the businesses.

“Because we are very keen to drive the growth of businesses in Africa we have over the years found ways in which service our SME clients in particular. But in the last year or so we have done a number of significant improvements to the proposition especially for our SME clients”.

“We’ve been speaking to them over some time asking them feedback in terms of how our services are to them and how can we help them to actually improve their businesses better. Some of the key things they’ve spoken to us about is one the lack of time. For most people at that level, they do not have much time to leave their offices to come to our branches for our products and services. They’ve spoken to us about the importance of providing them with some form of knowledge in terms of how they run their businesses. They also talk us about helping them access other markets beyond Ghana”.

“As a result of that our proposition to the SME environment has been enhanced and we call our proposition Enterprise Banking proposition. The proposition has a number of legs to it. So the first one is we’ve launched the Enterprise direct proposition. It provides our SME clients to a trusted advisor without them leaving their offices. Through our enterprise direct we are serving over 10,000 clients across the country. We’ve also launched an electronic platform which we call enterprise online which allows the business person from the comfort of their shops or businesses to access their accounts which allows them to make certain transfers themselves. We also have a financing product which we all the enterprise smart loan which is also tailored specifically at this particular market”, he said.

He also disclosed that his outfit has introduced a banking product which will allow for Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMEs) to access loans from the bank without any collateral.

“We have identified presenting collateral by way of access to loans from a bank as one of the challenges deterring businesses from borrowing from banks to finance their operations; it is in this regard that we have launched the Stanbic Smart loan as one of the services under our Enterprise banking proposition. Under this scheme, we provide ‘unsecured’ lending to SMEs ranging from as low as GH¢40,000 to as high as GH¢160,000 and by so doing, we only monitor the cash flow of the SME business and that would determine the eligibility of your application for support.”.

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