Post by Thierry Sanders CEO of MEKTAR, a member of the SME Finance Forum
Imagine that you provide loans to 400 small businesses … and your clients are doubling each month.
To make it more exciting: All your loans are unsecured loans, they have no collateral to back them; 98% of your businesses are informal; They are not formally registered as a business; and almost all your clients have no real bookkeeping system.
Sounds pretty scary…? Well this is my line of business, it is a very necessary business. At Mekar.id we finance small businesses in Indonesia that can’t get access to bank nor venture capital finance.
Mekar’s loans are risky, but so far have only 10 loans with late payments, at worst they’re 11 days late. We’ve been in operation for 5 months, and our loan portfolio is more than doubling every month. So yes, we need to do something about securing these unsecured loans.
