Fidelity Bank is set to introduce an Enterprise Fund aimed at giving catalyst to ongoing businesses and startups that have showed interest in helping the country achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The fund will be a dedicated fund to assist entities in the business environment harness their full social impact potentials, build their capacity and guide them as to how to grow their businesses in the market environment.
The project seeks to focus on certain groups of young entities and provide catalysts with regards to finance, business advisory services, and/or premises to enable them get to the next level.
It will be a flexible model with regards to credit requirements with less collateral conditions than usual to enable them drive their businesses. The project is a key private sector initiative and it is expected to be launched this year and start full implementation.
Management of the Bank have prioritized the efforts and the struggling nature of many startup companies and entities.
Aside basing the selection process on startups and early stage enterprises that have showed interest in helping the country achieve SDGs, businesses that are harnessing technological advancement towards realizing the country’s potentials in technology together with entities that have shown the ability to enable the state implement certain core objectives and initiatives also stand the chance of benefitting from the fund.
Speaking to the Goldstreet Business on the impact of the project during the launch of the 4th Ghana CEO Summit held in Accra, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Fidelity Bank Mr. Julian Opuni said having access to finance and data to do thorough financial analysis for business decision making would enable business owners come out with acceptable credit proposals.
“We are working on ways where we will rely more on the fundamentals of the business and what the forecast potential sales are, the quality of the management and, less reliance on things like collateral. It’s likely that we might do a silent pilot with a few companies and then launch the project”, he said.
Dundas Whigham