Business Owners struggle with complex & rigid Bank requirements.

While owners or management teams of small and medium sized businesses have a strong understanding of their underlying business activity, they don’t have knowledge or expertise in the working of Banks or of the various kinds of financing solutions banks are able to offer to meet funding requirements. Further, depending on the size of their operations, small businesses often do not have the critical mass to have a separate Treasury team with Banking expertise within their teams. Thus, small to medium businesses are often unable to identify the banking solution that best meets their needs, which results in them utilising products and services that are the not the most cost effective and/or the best suited for their specific requirements. 

“Contact Centre” Relationship Management. No one to discuss bespoke financing needs.

With the closure of the high street bank branches across the country, many small businesses find it difficult to locate a “banker” to speak to and often have to rely on Telephone Banking services i.e. contact a call centre to make a financing request. 

Moreover, for financing requests that might be even slightly outside the banks’ standard lending parameters, the business is more likely to get a “decline” with no opportunity to discuss and explain their request.

Small & Medium business are offered standard ‘off the shelf’ solutions – does not cater to business’ specific needs.

Having managed corporate clients across 3 continents for more than 2 decades and thus having worked extensively with CEOs, CFOs and Treasurers we realised that very often clients are sold ‘off the shelf’ solutions to cater to their banking needs. However, corporates don’t all have similar requirements and thus each business is better off with tailored solutions for their specific needs. Most banks offer ‘bespoke’ solutions only to their large global and international clients, while the smaller (in terms of size) clients have to “make do” with the ‘standard’ product offerings.

As Business grows there is limited in-house expertise to manage increased complexity. 

Managing a banking relationship is quite an intensive and full-time activity given the bank’s ongoing information and credit facilities monitoring requirements which can be a significant drain on the time of an already stretched management team of the company.

You are constrained by tight payment terms from your suppliers, or you find it difficult to unlock sales growth by offering customers easier payment terms given your tight cash conversion cycle. Alternatively, you have seasonal working capital requirements and thus need financing to tide over these spikes.