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The CBN has and MSME Development Fund, how is Fidelity Bank taking advantage of the initiative to support its customers?

Fidelity Bank has one of the strongest SME banking business franchises in Nigeria driven by our one-on-one business advisory services and other business management capacity development initiatives for SMEs. On financing, apart from our tailored on-balance-sheet lending interventions to the SME market segment, we are one of the leading disbursement banks of the CBN MSME Development Fund. So far, we have disbursed over N2.4 billion to SMEs all over the country with significant levels of repayments. We understood right from the jump that a safe lending environment for SMEs would be one that de-risks the structural, governance and business management capacity issues that SMEs have, to neutralise or at worst keep the incident of default to the barest minimum. Hence, the all-inclusive nature of our SME banking business offering. We take it way beyond lending. One of the areas that we have built significant capacity in-house is business management capacity development to help SMEs raise their business management game. We also help SMEs to enhance their market access via insertions in the value chains of our existing corporate clients either on the product supply or off-take side. On the technology side, we work with our technology alliance partners to create simple and easy to use solutions to help SMEs automate and optimize their business processes. We bring all these on board to ensure that we do not only lend safely but also to help our SME clients build sustainable businesses. On how we are utilising the CBN MSMEDF window to support SMEs, we try to focus more on the productive segments of the economy where margins are not as robust to help those SMEs optimise the performance of their businesses. The structure and pricing of the funds provide us the window to finance SME related transactions, which otherwise would have been expensive to finance from our balance sheet for the SMEs. Our unique approach helps to drive the achievement of the dual purpose of total SME inclusion and business portfolio diversification. We will continue to deepen our tailored advisory services, business management capacity development programmes and customized funding to SMEs, albeit, along market segment and business cluster lines for more effectiveness and efficiency. We will also continue to provide enhanced market access opportunities to SMEs as well as business process automation and optimisation tools to help our SME clients raise their game to compete nationally and globally.