Serving the unbanked and underserved through financial education and product innovation

IWAS honored to have been invited to present yesterday at MSME conference led by the UP Institute of Small Scale studies. For the better part of 2017 and literally all of 2018 I’ve been spending time connecting with entrepreneurs across the majority of local industries. Having the chance to meet owners and executives from large sophisticated businesses as well as smaller business owners has broadened my perspective.

First of all, it became obvious that most SME entrepreneurs do have a bachelor’s but not a business degree. As a result, a good and quite tedious. Finance is thus commonly the most overlooked function of a business. The ten- dency of entrepreneurs is to focus on core operations such as sales and marketing that are more con is quite abstract compared to managing inventories and employees. lifeblood of a business. It is more than just the cash in the bank account. Finance is the story of a business told objectively (a topic for another time.) The lack of basic financial knowledge is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Despite all the laws and fanfare centered around supporting SMEs virtually nothing has changed in the last decade, maybe because the issue is less about the top. Still, institutions are actively working to lower the barriers to entry, especially now with the advent of is because over the last decade it if at all viable, is the average SME.

gauge the health of an SME? Well, that is because there is barely anything to review. A common misconception is that bank statements Bank statements only provide information about the money sitting in the bank account. It misses out