Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a major role in South East Asia economies. SMEs account for the majority of businesses and are important contributors to job creation and regional economic development. Yet, 70% of SMEs have difficulty accessing formal financial services. Our mission is to solve their working capital problem.

Formal SMEs contribute up to 40% of national income (GDP) in South East Asia economies. These numbers are significantly higher when informal SMEs are included.

According to the Word Bank’s estimates
  • 600 million jobs will be needed by 2030 to absorb the growing global workforce, which makes SME development a high priority for many governments around the world.
  • In emerging markets, most formal jobs are generated by SMEs, which create 7 out of 10 jobs.
  • However, access to finance is a key constraint to SME growth, it is the second most cited obstacle facing SMEs to grow their businesses in emerging markets and developing countries.
  • SMEs are less likely to be able to obtain bank loans than large firms; instead, they rely on internal funds, or cash from friends and family, to launch and initially run their enterprises.

What we do

A key area of the our work is to improve SMEs’ access to finance . Our approach is holistic, combining advisory and lending services to clients to increase the contribution that SMEs can make to the economy including underserved segments such as women owned SMEs.

Advisory support for SME finance mainly includes implementation and knowledge sharing of good practice. We provide:
Improving credit infrastructure (credit reporting systems, secured transactions and collateral registries, and insolvency regimes) which can lead to greater SME access to finance.
Introducing innovation in SME finance such as digital lending platforms, use of alternative data for credit decisioning, invoicing, factoring and supply chain financing.