Skye Bank pledges funding, capacity building for SMEs

Mrs. Ibiye Ekong, Executive Director, South-South/Retail Banking, Skye Bank Plc, has pledged the bank’s continued support to the growth of small and medium enterprises through capacity building and funding.

Speaking at the bank’s 7th SME seminar in Abuja with the theme “Leveraging Technology To Grow Your Business”, Ekong assured the bank’s customers and SME owners that the institution would assist them access both the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Bank of Industry (BOI) SME funds to grow their businesses.

She also dropped a hint that the bank would in November launch an online mall platform called YesMall to promote Small and Medium scale Nigerian businesses. She described the proposed online platform as a veritable avenue for bringing the bank’s customers and prospects to showcase their goods and services to the growing online population in Nigeria.

The bank director said the YesMall platform was conceived to help grow the bank customers’ businesses both locally and globally, noting that Nigeria had about 93million internet subscribers online.

While delivering his speech, the guest speaker and business mogul, who is also the Managing Director/CEO of Imsy Ventures, Mr. Benois Imoisili, expressed great optimism about the expansion of small and medium business in Nigeria.

According to him, the SME sector has the capacity to drive and encourage indigenous business and rural economic development such that the whole country can be transformed into a productive economy and help the people to employment.

“For me, I feel there are lots of reasons to be optimistic about the development of the sector in Nigeria. Forum like this opens our eyes to the depth of what we can transform our businesses to if we truly open our heart to suck in information. I know that there are still loads of businessmen that are not aware but they need to know with the joint efforts of Skye Bank Plc, CBN and BoI”. Imoisili submitted.

Speaking in the same vein, Nkolika Okoli Head, Retail Banking, Skye Bank disclosed that the Bank was coming up with solutions that would help to minimize the cost of doing businesses for small business owners.

Participants at the seminar were also advised to deploy information technology to access information globally to grow their businesses and harness the opportunities in the global market.