Videos

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Denise Leonhard, Senior Director of Global Corporate Strategy for PayPal, detailed the development of PayPal’s lending service. She also honed in on three major points that she believes will benefit SMEs. 

“When we think about opening up the internet for [SMBs] success [there] [are] three different points...Access to be able to sell online...Enabling them to get their funds out...Working capital to grow their business,” she shared.

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Hans Docter, Director for Sustainable Economic Development, at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, discussed the role innovation plays in respect to mobilizing more finance for SMEs. 

Hans Docter said, “Millions of small businesses are not getting the finance they need [and] in order to deliver services to them, we need to be innovative, try new approaches and use digital technology to come up with smart solutions.”

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Joyce Tee, Managing Director and Group Head of SME Banking for DBS Bank, encouraged SMEs to consider the necessity of insurance for their business. 

“Insurance has a way to actually cover a lot of [SMEs] risks. This is about how to make education, awareness of insurance that is accessible [and] understandable to SMEs...It’s never about pushing a product out,” Tee said. “We don’t believe in that. It’s about making sure it is relevant to them.”

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Zhaoli Meng, Dean of JD Finance Institute detailed the power of JD’s logistics and how it is working to serve more SMEs. 

JD.com is China’s largest online retailer and its biggest overall retailer, as well as the country’s biggest Internet company by revenue. They have 400 million consumers, among those 200 million SMEs.

“We help SMEs sell their product [along] [with] [providing] financial services,” Meng shared. 

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Ankur Mehrotra, Managing Director of Grab details their expansion from a ride-hailing app to the largest offline-to-online (O2O) platform in South East Asia. 

‘We have taken the Grab financial umbrella from E-Wallet - to cater to those without a bank account - to other forms of financial services such as lending and insurance. We started lending to our drivers because we have very good data on their ability to pay and therefore the price of that credit risk is lower for us than it would be for a high street bank’.

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Dawn Miller, Senior Vice President of Chubb, elaborates on the powerhouse potential of SMEs and the number of challenges they are facing. She also shares more on the progress Chubb is making as they reach SMEs through technology.  

From supporting sustainable agriculture in Burkina Faso to tech start-ups in Kenya, here’s a snippet of IFC's work across Africa.

IFC’s new report—Moving Toward Gender Balance in Private Equity and Venture Capital.  

During the Global SME Finance Forum 2018, Georgina Baker, Vice President of IFC discussed the importance of formalizing SMEs and giving them access to finance to help the economy and formal sector grow. 

Baker explained, “If you [SMEs] are informal and don’t understand what banks require, you shy away and don’t get access to the money. It’s very important for us to find ways to bring informal SMEs into the banking system and help them get access.”