FDB Digital Financial Literacy Programme
Fiji Development Bank has highlighted its focus on sectors and segments which require financial literacy, and that would be beneficial for microsmall, small,and medium enterprises especially for the women entrepreneurs, young farmers of the country.
Finance Minister
While officiating at the launch, chief guest deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Strategic Planning, National Development and Statistics, Professor Biman Prasad commended the Bank for reaching out to the wider community through digital means. Mr Prasad highlighted that financial literacy is critical to the success of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
“Statistics around the world are quite big in terms of how many small and medium enterprises eventually succeed and research also shows that those who have ac
cess to financial literacy training and programs invariably do better than those who don’t,” Mr Prasad said.
“I am very pleased that the Bank is launching the financial literacy program for our people, jointly with Visa. I want to express my gratitude, on behalf of the government and the Bank, to Visa for their generous partnership in this initiative.”
“We are particularly pleased that the Bank is putting emphasis on SMEs and this financial literacy programme is going to go a long way in enhancing the ability of our SMEs to upscale their operations and become real players in our economy.”
The Deputy Prime Minister also applauded the Bank for remaining committed to its mandate.
“I now understand that there are about 10,000 customers and the majority of them are in the SMEs and agriculture sector.
“In some sense, the mandate of the Bank has remained on track and its contribution to Fiji’s economic development, particularly
in the agriculture sector is wellknown.”
Digital Financial Literacy
Fiji Development Bank digital financial literacy programme is not only for Fiji Development Bank customers, it is for everyone says FDB chief executive officer, Saud Minam.
Mr Minam said anyone that has access to the internet, through a smart phone or laptop may access the page with no cost to it.
He said the programme is user friendly that allow anyone to navigate through the steps with ease. “The programme provides marketing plan, it also provides the cash plan and savings plan, and to the next level of in terms of creating balance sheets,” Mr Minam said.
“The Fiji Development Bank has been developing a lot of these products which are related to the MSMEs and that’s where I had a little bit of struggle of MSMEs and SMEs in especially for the agriculture.
“The agricultural segment may
not have the accessibility to all these things even though there we have seen rapid growth in that segment, in order for us to graduate them to the next level, it’s important for them to understand the financial literacy.
Mr Minam said they wanted to do more after the launch of a successful program towards women (woman entrepreneur loan) which they launched four months ago, had 500 customers with about $1.2 million already been dispersed, and customers were paying back the loan within three to four months showed their business were stable. “That’s where we will need to support them in terms of the financial literacy program.
Going Digital and Paperless
Mr Minam said since they had their applications rolled on digital platform as it is accessible, 75 to 80 percent of their customers are now on digital platforms.
They had received 17,000 applications and none were written applications.
“We have seen a massive reduction in terms of the people coming to the branches, not only taking the loan but also the payments are coming through the digital channels as well.
“When you talk about the future the future is right here. We have not printed any bank statement in last eight months.
Every single thing is on digital. They need to have an email access and they need to have the special code and then you can actually access to that.
“That’s where the program is going to be, we will eliminate all the papers within our own bank,our old processes are also worked to digital, all legal documentation or approvals,”he said.
Looking ahead
Mr Minam assured that there were more innovative products in the pipeline and could be launched as early as February and March. The next phase will also be on digital wallet.