Fidelity Bank Plc on Tuesday disbursed a total of N80 million out of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN’s) N220 billion micro, small and medium scale enterprise (MSME) development fund, to three of its customers.
The beneficiaries were Pedro Plastics Nigeria Limited, Petters & Daniels Industries Limited and F.N. Uzo-Best Nigeria Limited.
The bank said the customers qualified for the intervention fund having met all the criteria set by the central bank.
Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Fidelity Bank, Mr. Nnamdi Okonkwo, who spoke at a ceremony in Lagos urged MSME operators to take advantage of the fund to expand their businesses. He pointed out the fund was not only special for the economy, the CBN, the government and the banking industry, but also special to Fidelity Bank.
According to Okonkwo, “anything that has to do with micro, medium and small scale enterprises, Fidelity Bank’s name becomes a recurring decimal.
“Why? This is because this is an area some people think is too risky to support. But we make bold to say that with proper dimensioning of the risk involved in supporting this area, with proper planning, proper focus and development of special products, we at Fidelity Bank are proud to say we took this sector head on, and we haven’t had a bad experience.”
According to Okonkwo, the whole idea of the N220 MSME fund was to make funds available to the deprived MSME sector of the area economy.
He noted the country has about 17 million registered SMEs, saying that in most countries, SMEs account for over 70 per cent of businesses.
“Yet in developing economies like Nigeria, SMEs suffer from lack of access to finance. It was in recognition of this that the N220 billion was set up, with special focus for people that play in agriculture, manufacturing, renewable energy and other areas that would drive development in the economy. The good news is that one person can borrow as much as N50 million, with an interest rate of nine per cent and the MSME operator can borrow for a maximum of five years.
“The beneficiaries today are employers working hard to provide employment to this economy, to manufacture things that ordinarily we would be importing. We at Fidelity Bank believe that it is not just about running banking to make profit, we just support operators of small businesses. The fund will raise their capacity to do business and make them competitive,” he added.
Two years ago, Fidelity Bank launched its Managed SME unit.
This according to Okonkwo, was to show the level of commitment and seriousness of the bank to the sector.
“The way we have approached management of SMEs is to create clusters. Our people spent two weeks in Aba, at the Ariara market, studying what they do, their needs and challenges. For the Aba cluster, we designed a N600 million loan portfolio for the businessmen.
“Under our approach, our people also teach these people simple book keeping. Our dream is that these three gentlemen sitting here today to access this loan would become multinationals tomorrow SME operators need hand-holding partners to grow. – Thisday.
