BY MICHAEL EBOH
Diamond Bank Plc said it has disbursed N25 billion to 7,000 Micro Small and Medium scale Enterprises, MSMEs, in the country within the last two years.

According to the bank, this is part of its contribution to economic development and commitment to empowering MSMEs in Nigeria.

Speaking at the Diamond BusinessXtra Enterprise Series, Head of Proposition for MSMEs of the Bank, Mrs. Chidinma Lawanson, said, henceforth, the bank will focus on creating value for businesses that fall within this sector because they are largely ignored within the banking industry and the economy at large.

She disclosed that as part of plan to restructure the MSMEs sector to contribute immensely to the economy, the bank has developed a guarantee focus by creating a current account product that makes it easy for over 85, 000 entrepreneurs with the bank to gain access to loans without being charged COT.

According to her, beneficiaries of the current account product for MSMEs have grown from 7,000 customers to more than 85, 000 customers within a period of two years and it is still growing.

“So far, we have given loans of over N25 billion to over 7000 customers in Nigeria since the inception and these loans are strictly between N1 million to N10 million.

“Most of these customers utilize the loans in buying fixed assets or stock of tradable goods and they do pay back. The repayment levels have been very high,” she said.

Lawanson said that although there are more than 10 million registered MSMEs in Nigeria, but those accessing the bank’s loan have continued to contribute significantly to the country’s GDP.

She, however, acknowledged that access to funds has been a mitigating the growth of MSMES, but noted that further plans by the bank to support the sector’s drive is to regularly organise the Enterprise Series seminars to tutor entrepreneurs on how best to improve their business for growth with available funds.

She further noted that the bank had to unfold new dimension to strengthen the sector, “because first most entrepreneurs are unstructured many of them may not have the necessary collateral, some might not be well educated to exactly say what they need the funds for or have the discipline to handle the loans.

“But we have been able to structure such products that we give to them in a way that it is plug-and- play; it is simple for them to gain access to those funds, because if you look back at what they have done so far, so their businesses would have existed to at least for one year.”

In his contribution, the Managing Consultant, Mr. Olusegun Ogidan, lamented that 95 per cent of entrepreneurs fail at the early stage of businesses not just because of lack of funds but due to lag of strategic planning and corporate culture.

In his lecture, titled, ‘Strategic Planning,’ he expressed the need for SMEs managers to also be mindful of political, economic, social and technological trends.

Similarly, Olugbolahan George, the Chief Consultant, Mark-George Consultants, stressed the need for developing a business plan prior to investing in a business, explain that it would develop the entrepreneur’s business knowledge.

He urged, SMEs operators to adhere to accepted accounting practices for financial information.