By Babajide Komolafe
Diamond Bank has supported 5000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with over N20 billion worth of credit facilities in 2018.
Head, Emerging Market Businesses, Diamond Bank, Mrs Ayodele Olojede, disclosed this during an interview withFinancial Vanguard, saying this is in addition to various programmes and services introduced by the bank to support SMEs with the objective of helping them overcome their challenges.
She stated: “We have various loan programmes to support our SMEs. Our bespoke lending programme which we have also just recently introduced that takes care of all of the challenges that typically will keep a lot of banks away from managing SMEs; it is a cash flow lending one and in fact we have just celebrated a milestone of been able to grant to up to about N1billion to 560 SMEs in our books based on the challenges of collateral issues, bookkeeping because our officers are trained to be able to help you put together your financial statement.
“So they are able to help you put your books together, it takes care of challenges around succession planning, it takes care of challenges around collateral. So it is a bespoke one that we really want to be able to scale up. But outside of that, this year alone we have been able to grant N20 billion to about 5000 SMEs in our books.
“Another area that we help our customers is that we have clinics, and I think we have been able to have about 6000 of our customers take part in those clinics and the way the clinic runs is that you have one on one sessions with consultants that work with us, that partner with us to be able to look through your books, and then identify areas of challenges, and one on one they are able to talk to you through it.
So you leave there been equipped with the way you could solve that problem.”
