Stakeholders will gather on Thursday to deliberate on how to boost the participation of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in the formal banking sector in the country.
The platform of discussion would be the SUPERNEWS SMEs Conference, which will see the Director General of Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, Mr Charles Odii, the Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Communications Commission, Dr Aminu Maida, other regulators, experts, stakeholders from the financial services and ICT sectors, small business owners in attendance.
The keynote address of the conference with the theme ‘Bringing SMEs into the Financial Services Network via Fintech’ will be delivered by economist and financial expert, Dr Biodun Adedipe.
The Publisher of SUPERNEWS Nigeria, Ngozi Onyeakusi, in a statement in Lagos, said the choice of the theme of the conference was borne out of the quest to improve the business climate for SMEs in Nigeria by leveraging technology to access financial services.
She said, “It is unfortunate that SMEs that form the bedrock of every economy are plagued by a lot of challenges, especially inadequate access to finance.”
Indeed, reports have shown that the challenge of SMEs in accessing funds could be traced to inadequate access to financial institutions and education, skills, experience of owners/managers, high interest rates, and gender discrimination, among others.
“It therefore becomes imperative to leverage on technology to ensure their sustainability, productivity and profitability.”
The latest study from Visa, the SME Megatrends report showed that SMEs in Nigeria remained heavily underserved and underbanked with a considerable amount of SMEs relying on personal loans and informal credit, as they face obstacles and requirements that make it difficult to secure loans from banks and other formal lending institutions.
Punch