Our friends at Mashreq are targeting 100k SME customers by the end of the year, up from 70k currently, as the Emirati lender doubles down on SME financing through new flexible financing products and more digitization, head of business banking and NeoBiz, Rajeev Chalisgaonkar, told EnterpriseAM UAE. Within the bank’s retail banking group, SMEs currently

account for a significant part of revenues and profits, Chalisgaonkar said.

The bank is piloting several SME-focused initiatives to reach that target, including introducing unsecured lending, soft tokens, and more trade financing products on its new SME-focused business banking app, Mashreq Biz. The app has already become the top-rated business banking app in the UAE, averaging a 4.9 rating across both iOS and Android app stores since its launch in February, Chalisgaonkar told us.

Mashreq Biz is also key to Mashreq’s plans to secure more clients and retain existing ones. Among the metrics they use to measure success? The number of calls to their contact center, which on average take around 6.5 minutes. “That number used to be 400 per 1k customers — it is now down to 309,” Chalisgonkar said. That means a reduction of around 25% since the launch of the app. The goal is to take that number down further to 180, he added. Other transactions like fund transfers are also taking less time than before, down from 10-15 minutes to half a minute, he added.

Soft tokens, set to be rolled out by the end of this quarter, will replace one-time passwords (OTPs), which are a lot less reliable, especially if a client is traveling which can impact deliverability, Chalisgonkar explained. Instead, soft tokens — like digital certificates planted on your device — will be reliable so long as you have your phone on you.

The bank also plans to introduce three or four more trade finance products to the app, Chalisgonkar said. Currently, SME clients can request letters of credit or letters of guarantee directly through the app, but clients want more. “Dubai is a massive trade hub,” he said. “Almost every company here is doing something internationally… it’s a heavily externalized economy, which means that the biggest demand is for simple and easy cross-border transaction products,” he added.

There’s also increased demand for more flexible working capital. “We recognize that, especially in segments like NeoBiz, there are lots of companies that were set up two or three years back, and they’re getting to a stage where they are growing fast and need working capital, but don’t necessarily have any kind of property or other assets to offer,” he explained.

The bank plans to introduce unsecured lending for small tickets in the lower single-digit mns, with an eye to pilot the new initiative in the next two months and launch it later this year, Chalisgaonkar said. The goal is to allow SMEs to receive approval for their financing in less than a day. “Open banking will play a role because that will allow us to get all that data digitally, like VAT statements and corporate tax data, for example,” he said.

This is not the only way Mashreq is helping SMEs secure working capital faster — the lender recently partnered with NeoPay — and Network International before that — to introduce PoS lending tailored to merchants in the UAE. Lending can go up to AED 4 mn per transaction, and the facility is approved solely based on PoS sales data, with in-principle approval taking 15 minutes, Chalisgaonkar said.

How much can PoS data tell you? A lot. “It’s not just about the AED 2 mn received through the machine last month — we look at whether or not they are regular payments, what the variability of flows are like, how often there are funds returned to customers — so there’s around 10 different data points we look out for,” he explained.

To mitigate risks of default, “we make sure to do KYC on merchants, and we run a report on the individuals running the company to see their credit scores, because there is a very clear correlation between personal behavior of SME owners in financial terms and the company’s financial behavior,” he added.

Mashreq is also planning on expanding NeoBiz outside of the UAE: The bank is preparing to launch the SME digital banking proposition in Egypt this year, following the conclusion of piloting and testing, which is currently underway, and pending approvals from the Central Bank of Egypt, he told us. Pakistan would follow with a launch later this year or early next year.

Tags: