(VEN) – To secure the credit growth target in the last months of this year and provide sufficient capital for the domestic economy, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will be key customer for commercial banks.
SMEs will be key customer for commercial banks
Ensuring capital sufficiency and convenient banking services
The SMEs seldom have financial resources to maintain operations for a long period of time in the economic slowdown. Therefore, what they are interested in is cash flows instead of profits as the cash flows could make them viable. To meet this demand, many banks including VPBank have adopted credit packages to support SMEs. Fung Kai Jin, the Director in charge of SMEs at VPBank said, “We have designed credit products for SMEs only such as loans in foreign currency with lower interest rates, the SME Success Program offering competitive interest rates to support customers at the early stage of their loans. Apart from loans, VPBank also develops cash collection and payment services to help SMEs use working capital effectively.”
At present, many enterprises said despite many preferential credit packages, it is not easy to access bank loans. A leader from a joint stock bank said that, like SMEs, banks are also facing difficulties. In difficult economic circumstances, banks need to be cautious about capital disbursement to avoid bad debts. A weak bank will not be able to support economic growth. Therefore, banks are tightening their borrowing conditions. However, to reach the credit growth target of 12 percent for this year, commercial banks are making great efforts to pour capital to support domestic economic growth. Fung Kai Jin said, “In the remaining six months of in 2013, our loans for SMEs will increase by more than 10 percent. We target a credit growth of 15 percent for this year. VPBank will tighten risk and infrastructure management to ensure sustainable finance and credit growth.”
Business plans are to open the credit door
To offer solutions for weak SMEs to access bank’s capital sources, Fung Kai Jin said that if SMEs want to access new loans, they need to present their business plans with high feasibility. This is a very important factor as the banks have to identify whether that enterprise could earn enough revenue to pay bank loans.
SMEs are important customers under long term strategies of banks, including VPBank. Therefore, Fung Kai Jin said that in the second half of this year, VPBank would make internal changes to better support its SME customers. It will invest in human resources and simplify its service products to meet customer’s demand rather than only compete in terms of interest rates./.
By Duy Minh
Đăng ký: VietNam News
