geo/malaysia
“Beyond the orthodox banking system, we need to help diversify the financing ecosystem in order to help SMEs obtain funds for growth purposes,”said Malaysian Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng at the Securities Commission Malaysia on Monday.
SMEs comprise about 98.5% of total business establishments in the country, and employ two-thirds of all workers in Malaysia.
smefinance
News via The Malaysian Reserve.
The Malaysian Entrepreneurs Festival (TMEF) will host the SME Tech Summit on Oct. 10 in Komtar, Penang. The conference is aimed to help SMEs embrace digital platforms and experience innovative changes.
TMEF is aimed to empower start-ups, cultivate entrepreneurship and SMEs. They are committed to connecting SMEs, transforming entrepreneurship and nurturing economic development for the country. TMEF has hosted a series of SME Transformation Initiatives nationwide and has helped more than 50,000 SMEs.
Key topics on the agenda to be discussed at the summit include:
The two-day Global Payment Summit hosted by Currency Research will be held in the capital of Malaysia on Sept. 19-20. Top executives from financial services institutions and the payment industry will be in attendance.
Currency Research, is an international knowledge based services firm committed to providing specialized conferences, consultancy and research in the currency and payments areas. The firm has over 25 years of event organization and subject-matter expertise.
Key topics discussed during the event will include:
The SME Association of Malaysia states, funding, digitization knowledge and lack of manpower are negatively affecting rural SMEs aiming to implement digitization. Datuk Michael Kang Hua Keong, national president of the Association believes the government can do more to help SMEs.
“The government can also assist SMEs in providing lower cost in e-commerce on-boarding and digital advertising and promotion to promote the branding of SMEs especially for Made-in-Malaysia products.”
Public credit guarantees have become a popular instrument to expand lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). More than 30 percent of credit guarantee schemes around the world have some form of state ownership. Public credit guarantee schemes are particularly important in developing countries, where they are the main type of guarantee scheme.
The Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ACCCIM)’s SME Survey Report 2017 aims at identifying the current SMEs challenges in Malaysia.
In January last year, Riza Fansuri was in a quandary. The 37-year-old, who runs a small food supplier in a Jakarta suburb, wanted to develop new products, but that would take money. He tried applying for loans at banks, but they all turned him down because he could not provide sufficient collateral.
SME Bank has made history as the first Development Financial Institution (DFI) in Malaysia and Asean to be a member of The Montreal Group (TMG). TMG is an exclusive global forum for state-owned development banks focused on assisting micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Founded in 2012 by seven members with a total estimated combined assets of US$2 trillion, TMG was established to encourage exchange of ideas, best practices and foster greater understanding of the international market for the growth of SMEs.
Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) aims to set up a comprehensive funding ecosystem to meet various financing needs of the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. BNM director of development finance and enterprise department, Marina Abdul Kahar, said as at end-2015, financial institutions gave out RM274.5bil in loans to 730,000 SMEs. “The financial institutions always give their support as seen in the high fund approval rate of around 80 per cent for SMEs,” she said at the opening of Malayan Banking Bhd’s ‘Building Capacity and Competitiveness of SMEs’ progamme.
