According to John Chong, Maybank’s Group CEO of Community Financial Services, of the 6,950 start-ups & microenterprises which received loans this way, around 2,000 have only been in operation for two years or less. Altogether, the SME Digital Financing scheme has covered benefiting over 8,200 SMEs to date. “This is a breakthrough in our SME financing, to be able to expand our lending relationships to new business enterprises. By using our in-house data and credit knowledge while leveraging machine learning capabilities, we are able to better measure the risks of start-ups which often lack credit history and extend financing to them,” he said. Maybank claimed that the SME Digital Financing was the first in the market to offer an end-to-end digital experience, with straight-through processing, from application to approval and disbursement. With speed as a key feature, the bank noted that all applications that were eligible for instant decisions received their approval and disbursements in less than five minutes as the entire process can be done entirely online via Maybank2u or Maybank2uBiz. (Source: Maybank. Image: Google Maps, Maybank / Facebook. )
