WE’VE all heard this before: banks may be a fairweather friend.
When all is pleasant and sunny, banks roundly support groups during good times. But whilst dark clouds accumulate, banks ‘ credit score strains have to get through a difficult period.
This criticism of banks and their so-called mercenary tack does not get away, Janet Young, with director and head of institution channels and digitalization at UOB, who, in March, shepherded a busload of enterprise clients from markets such as Singapore, China, and Vietnam, to the yearly OurCrowd summit held in Jerusalem.
There, those small and medium-sized organization (SME) clients from Southeast Asia mingled with portfolio agencies of OurCrowd, a UOB-backed assignment capital set up in Israel that would matchmake accredited investors to its portfolio companies via equity crowdfunding.
It’s an outdated view, says Ms. Young, that a bank takes an umbrella away on a wet day. Instead, banks are increasingly trying to work with SME clients to ease them into restructuring for destiny. This is a destiny that includes investing in technology and polishing their wits to tackle miles of large opportunities in an increasingly wired world.
Behind closed doorways, banks with SME clients will say that even as headline numbers recommend that SME investment is missing, the reality that lenders warfare with is in getting SMEs to adopt a business approach.
As one mirrored image of this, UOB has an FDI (overseas direct funding) advisory unit that it uses to attract funding flows from SMEs inside the area trying to make investments; however, they need guidance on the way to expand into new markets that may be greater difficult to navigate. The difficulties come given a cocktail of troubles, starting from capital controls to the differing business conditions that show Southeast Asia is whatever but homogeneous.
When UOB started running with OurCrowd in 2015, its place began to bring together the investing wishes of its SME customers and the leading-edge ideas from Israel – an area that offers deep-tech solutions and is one of the most important hubs for artificial intelligence services globally.
