Financier cites growth of Filipino traders
Esquire Financing Inc. expects a surge in its loan releases this year to about P6 billion, citing the growth in the number of Filipinos who are putting up their own businesses.
Th amount represented a 55-percent increase from the P3.86 billion worth of loans it released last year.
Esquire Financing, which provides financing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), boasts of over 6,000 clients and investors here and abroad.
On the sidelines of the Philippine SME Business Expo Friday, Esquire Financing chair and CEO Rajan A. Uttamchandani said there had been a pick up in loans as more entrepreneurs are looking to grow their businesses.
“The banks are not really lending to the SME sector…. The large sectors are served because all banks are targeting the top 5,000 companies, while the 995,000 registered businesses that are classified as micro, small and medium enterprises are really underserved. This is where Esquire comes in,” he said.
A lot of the local banks have even started using Esquire as “conduits” to comply with their mandate to provide financing for the SME sector. This means that the banks lend to Esquire which, in turn, lends to the SMEs, Uttamchandani said.
He admitted that this underserved segment is so huge that he is actually encouraging similar financing institutions to take on SMEs.
“There’s more of a market than we can actually serve, and it’s growing faster than Esquire is growing,” he explained.
Esquire provides financing for SMEs that have been operating for at least a year and are looking to expand their businesses over the long-term, Uttamchandani said.
Esquire currently has 50 direct sales partners and over a thousand sales affiliates. The target is to have over a thousand sales partners in five years’ time.
Uttamchandani defined sales partners as “partners of Esquire who recruit sales affiliates to be able to serve SMEs, providing consultancy and easy access to financing.”
