In challenging economic conditions, SMEs are key to supporting livelihoods and creating jobs, and may even support efforts to address the root causes of the difficult conditions themselves. Although small businesses may be contributors to a country’s resilience, they’re often the first to be cut off when macro-conditions deteriorate and lending to SME may be even further constrained.
The SME Finance Forum is hosting a two-session webinar series on Digital Banking Solutions, the first on platforms and the second on automation. Digitalization has led to disruption in banking, challenging conventional practices, opening up many new partnership opportunities and making it possible for new entrants to provide innovative products and services at a lower cost to the customer.
Since its formation, the SME Finance Forum has been on top of all of the major trends in this field. We predicted the importance of partnership when all around us were emphasizing fintech-bank competition. We declared that competitiveness in financing now had to include additional non-financial support for improving SMEs themselves – a reversal of decades of advice, but now common wisdom.
POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE:
Given recent developments related to the COVID-19 outbreak, the program has been postponed.
SME Finance Forum Immersion Program 2020:
DBS, Singapore
(by invitation only)
Each month the SME Finance Forum organizes webinars for its members. We invite industry experts from leading banks or innovative fintechs to talk about their approach to small business finance. Members can tune in to the webinars via WebEx or the phone. The webinars are designed to be interactive and we encourage members to ask questions and engage in a discussion with the speakers.
If you are interested in learning more about the webinars please contact Jessica Alfaro at jalfaro2@ifc.org
The Global SME Finance Forum 2019 will be held October 7-9 in the Netherlands. The annual flagship event of the SME Finance Forum will bring 500+ senior executives from commercial banks, development finance institutions, fintech companies, as well as regulators to focus on leveraging digital banking to serve MSMEs.
REGISTRATION OPENS NOW!
This SME Finance Forum webinar will build on the January 2019 alternative data, scoring and risk management webinar which highlighted that the smaller the firm, the less conventional the data that is usually available. This can make access to formal credit and financial services more difficult to obtain, due to both perceived risks from traditional lenders and the potential higher cost of lending.
The SME Finance Forum organized a workshop to discuss the Financial Stability Board's (FSB) evaluation on the effects of G20 financial reforms on the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises. The consultation report was published in early June and comments are due by 7 August.
