New entrants boosting
access to finance

With an annual Trade Finance gap of between $80bn and $120bn, the African continent has a well of untapped potential in the small and medium enterprises (SMMEs) sector and closing the gap will be transformational for the continent.

As a banking group, the narrative to us is often simplified down to: “Just lend more to SMEs” – the mechanics of executing this, are slightly more complicated.

While much work is being done to improve access to finance for SMMEs, a major challenge remains the lack of visibility of financial data - for both consumers and businesses - to help inform decision-making and lending models. In the past, a traditional lender like a bank would be looking for information like your company registration details, the credit record of your directors and 3 months of bank statements – while this is useful, none of these are necessarily a fair reflection on the state of your small business or its ability to repay loans.

This traditional model of banking is not fit for purpose in 2022 and these old-school documents will not show in real-time how many transactions are going through your business or the hard slog that you have put in to secure a contract supplying a major blue-chip client as an Enterprise Development beneficiary.

While data on the cash economy is hard to pin down, cash usage is significant and much of this consumer insight remains out of any kind of digital net to improve decision-making. Research suggests as much as 90% of retail transactions are still cash-based. In South Africa, data suggests that there are 1.8m informal traders and 8 out of 10 had no bank account – this in what is arguably Africa’s most advanced financial services sector.

As the leading Pan-African banking group, we have focused a significant amount of our energy on these digital solutions and instead of seeing new non-banking entrants as threats, we see them as natural partners that can improve our banking offering to our clients.

One of the areas we are specifically targeting is using technology to improve access to finance in the working capital and Supply Chain finance arena. In principle this should be an easier part of the market to unlock – with large corporates and multinationals standing behind purchase orders and contracts, this should de-risk transactions. As a bank, we are seeking out strategic relationships with multinationals as well as Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) to try and close this gap here and agriculture is one of the areas where we believe we have made meaningful progress in the last few years.

We are now expanding our focus to more specialist businesses including those operating in the manufacturing and technology sectors. The African Continental Free Trade Area will drive regional trade and this is where data will be particularly important.

The more we can bring digital finance solutions into the net, the easier it will be to deploy funding to qualifying entrepreneurs.

The signs are promising: 2021 was a record year for Venture Capital into African businesses and this trend is expected to continue into 2022. Notable inbound investments included Jumo, Flutterwave, MFS Africa and Zepz.

With many of these new investments going into technology-driven financial services businesses which will feed the ecosystem and ultimately free up much needed finance for entrepreneurs. In SA there are a number of fintechs involved in providing unsecured working capital solutions.

Kenya and Nigeria, for us, looks particularly exciting with a variety of new technologies and players coming to the fore.

Ghana is another country who we are excited about. The banking system and payments infrastructure has evolved significantly in the past 10 years, and they now also have fintech businesses like Float – which helps provide short-term liquidity and cashflow - raising $17m from international investors and Dash raising $32.8 in March 2022. These are significant investments, and they will drive the shift to digitisation.

The growth in non-cash payments has also been accelerated by Covid. This has meant that there are many different payment acceptance methods available. Absa is the largest acquirer of payments on the continent, enabling many businesses across the continent to accept payments digitally, online or by means of a card. In addition, there are many service providers in this market, such as Wizzit, Zapper, Yoko, iKhokha in SA, and businesses making use of Nigeria’s payment platform Flutterwave, or Mpesa in Kenya - digitisation is changing this accumulation of data and is building up important insights that will help improve lending to small businesses.

The increase in non-cash payments together with the advantage to be the largest acquirer of payments on the continent created the ideal window of opportunity for Absa to incentivise customers to support SMEs by implementing Small Business Fridays. Sales remain the cheapest form of funding and through this campaign Absa Rewards customers who shop at participating SME outlets on Fridays will earn double cash back when they use their Absa card to pay at an Absa card machine. In addition, participating SMEs will be profiled on a dedicated Small Business Portal and receive cash rewards when they reach certain milestones across their Absa card machines for the month, which will be paid into their transactional accounts. This campaign provides additional marketing to the SMEs as well as boost their cash flow by encouraging sales and providing incentives when they reach their targets. The consequential digital tracking of transactions on the back of this campaign aims to increase the credibility of the SME to potential credit providers.

With this shift to digital platforms, many tools available is making it much easier for a business to be understood by credit providers, we have a unique opportunity to re-imagine the SMME ecosystem for the continent. We look forward to playing our part as the bank that drives multi-channel digital technology solutions which makes it easier for entrepreneurial businesses to ride the wave of economic growth in the coming years.