Five million SMEs; 2pc banked

ASK any banker in the country to name the single largest untapped commercial opportunity on their balance sheet, and the honest answer will not include corporates, nor consumers, not even mortgages. It is the roughly five million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are ostensibly bankable but sit almost entirely outside the formal credit system today. Ask the same banker why these have not been pursued, and the answer becomes more revealing: a mixture of risk language, regulatory caveats...

By none@none.com (Zafar Masud)