Raphael John-Lall

Just back from a small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es (SME) sem­i­nar in Pak­istan, Ayan­nah Mills, mar­ket­ing man­ag­er, Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd, is con­fi­dent the bank will con­tin­ue to as­sist in SME growth in the re­gion.

She was in Pak­istan on March 15 at a con­fer­ence on SME bank­ing and the role of non-fi­nan­cial ser­vices, host­ed by the State Bank of Pak­istan. "We gave an idea how Re­pub­lic Bank par­take in non-fi­nan­cial ser­vices in grow­ing SME busi­ness­es and how we view the SME Toolk­it as an ad­van­tage to grow small busi­ness­es." Mills spoke to the Guardian in an in­ter­view last Fri­day at Re­pub­lic Bank's head of­fice, Park Street, Port-of-Spain. The SME Toolk­it Caribbean is a Web site de­vel­oped by the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion (IFC) that us­es tools and doc­u­ments to help small busi­ness, Mills said.

Re­pub­lic Bank was the or­gan­i­sa­tion in the Caribbean the IFC chose to pro­mote the SME Toolk­it, which was launched in 2009. "It's an in­ter­ac­tive Web site that's tar­get­ed to the small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es. It fo­cus­es on in­for­ma­tion that they would not read­i­ly have avail­able on start­ing up a busi­ness, fil­ing tax­es, le­gal re­quire­ments, etc. It al­so has forms, doc­u­ments such as the mar­ket­ing plan, in­cor­po­ra­tion doc­u­ments, how to do your book and an­swers fre­quent­ly asked ques­tion. It was de­vel­oped by the IFC." Mills said that last month, Re­pub­lic Bank came on top in all the re­gions around the world that the IFC Toolk­it is avail­able in, in terms of the low­est bounce rate and the most page views per vis­it.

SMEs niche

Mills stat­ed that Re­pub­lic Bank had de­vel­oped an SME niche even be­fore it launched the IFC Toolk­it.

"We al­ready had our own pro­gramme on small and medi­um busi­ness­es. We al­so had al­ready had col­lab­o­ra­tion with lo­cal or­gan­i­sa­tions, such as Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness. We were al­ready do­ing non-fi­nan­cial pro­grammes for SMEs. "This is just an­oth­er non-fi­nan­cial ser­vice we can of­fer that will build and grow small busi­ness­es. If we teach SME to grow their busi­ness­es and their rev­enues grow, then they will need more bank­ing and they will need more bank­ing or fi­nan­cial ser­vices from us." Mills said Re­pub­lic Bank has trained ac­count man­agers who as­sist SMEs in ob­tain­ing in­for­ma­tion and pro­vid­ing non-fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance.

"We class our SMEs in our com­mer­cial cus­tomer seg­ment. We have a very vi­brant com­mer­cial cus­tomer busi­ness through our 34 branch­es net­work. This net­work has branch man­agers who fo­cus on small busi­ness­es and they have a cer­tain cri­te­ria to iden­ti­fy a small busi­ness up to a cer­tain dol­lar val­ue. The role of the ac­count man­agers in these branch­es is to iden­ti­fy these small busi­ness­es that they can bring abroad and open ac­counts with Re­pub­lic Bank that can grow their busi­ness­es. "These ac­count man­agers were trained as fi­nan­cial spe­cial­ists. They can ac­tu­al­ly help these SMEs where are the op­por­tu­ni­ties in their rev­enues streams, their prof­it and loss, and to do their books so on and guide them from a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tives." Mills said Re­pub­lic Bank wants to lend be­cause small busi­ness own­ers need mon­ey to grow their busi­ness. "Back in 2005 when we launched our SME pro­grammes, we re­alised that SMEs dif­fer­ent from cor­po­rate. SMEs need a lot more help than just open­ing an ac­count and per­form­ing trans­ac­tions and get­ting a loan. We're in bank­ing, but we re­alised that we need to look at oth­er strate­gies than just bank­ing," she said.

In the past, Mills said, some small busi­ness may have been afraid to come in and may have been de­clined and so need the ex­tra help. "When you come in­to a bank, you must have cer­tain doc­u­men­ta­tion, like a mar­ket­ing plan, fi­nan­cial pro­jec­tions, which not every­one knows know to do. They may have gone in with their own type of pa­per­work, which is in­ad­e­quate. So the SME Toolk­it would en­hance those doc­u­ments to re­duce the re­ject rate," she said.

Pitch­ing toolk­it

Talk­ing about Re­pub­lic Bank's oth­er plans for SMEs for the rest of the year, she said they will con­tin­ue to mar­ket their ser­vices."We will con­tin­ue to ad­ver­tise this toolk­it and en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to use this Web site. We want to grow the num­ber of reg­is­tered users." Mills said the bank al­so wants ac­count man­agers to go out in­to com­mu­ni­ties and get more small busi­ness own­ers in­to its net­work. "If they get more peo­ple on­to the site, then we could we could have an in­cen­tive for them in that area. The ac­count man­agers would have com­pa­nies and peo­ple they tar­get for this," she said. Mills said the bank will be tak­ing part in an­oth­er con­fer­ence with the IFC in May in Sri Lan­ka. "The ob­jec­tive for all the IFC Toolk­it part­ners around the world to come share and how they pro­mot­ed the site."