Financial Times

HSBC, riding on trade which is one of its major strengths, has taken small and medium enterprise (SME) financing on board its product range, the first foreign bank in the country to do so.

“The majority of Sri Lankan companies can be categorised as small businesses, because most are family run, unlisted in the Colombo Stock Exchange and have a small work force.

That’s an area we see with a lot of potential and we have discovered that one of our areas of strength in Sri Lanka, as it is in Hong Kong, is the SME sector. We are the only foreign bank in the country with a specific SME proposition and we opened a dedicated centre in Colombo last Tuesday to service our customers,” Margaret Leung, visiting General Manager Global Co-Head Commercial Banking, HSBC told The Sunday Times FT.

The new centre ‘BusinessVantage Solutions Centre’ will act as the nerve centre of the bank’s thrust into the SME segment. Ms Leung said HSBC’s strength in trade coupled with the international network will facilitate the financing of the SME sector, but it will be concentrating mainly on customers who have international business needs and not compete with local banks head on in all the categories. “We will get into an area where we have an advantage over our competitors and help the customers in machinery leasing, invoice discounting, cash leasing, international factoring and such. It all depends on who the customers are supplying or selling to and how we can support them in these processes,” she said.

The centre is manned by a team trained to understand the needs of customers in the major industries in which SMEs operate.

Ms Leung said businesses here for the most part understand the potential of the Internet and HSBC is in a strong position to facilitate needs arising from such usage. “According to a survey carried out by the Asia Foundation on e-commerce implementation among SMEs in Sri Lanka, 83 percent of respondents said they use the Internet for business, particularly for trade research," she said.