About 628 financial institutions have contributed to the development and growth of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) disclosed this in a report.
CBN stated that over 154,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) were assisted by the National Collateral Registry to access funds that these businesses need to grow, expand, and compete better in their various markets.
The National Collateral Registry assisted these Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises to access N1.2 trillion loans from 628 financial institutions to promote financial inclusion among these businesses in the country.
About National Collateral Registry
The National Collateral Registry is an initiative of the CBN in collaboration with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) designed to foster financial inclusion and sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
The National Collateral Registry seeks to deepen credit delivery to MSMEs through enhanced acceptability of movable assets such as equipment, machinery, vehicle, tricycle, crops, livestock, account receivables, inventories, jewelleries, amongst others as collateral for loans by financial institutions.
CBN’s NCR Loan report
As of December 19, 2018, CBN recorded an increase of 54 per cent in the number of MSMEs that have used their movable assets to obtain loans from financial institutions through the NCR, recording 154,827 MSMEs from 100,049 in the first year, 2017.
The report quoted by Vanguard also showed that 22,251 of the MSMEs were female entrepreneurs. A further breakdown showed that 146,777 of the borrowers were individuals, 3,416 were micro businesses, 2,169 were medium businesses, 1,777 were small businesses and 687 were large businesses.
Reason for the loan surge
The upsurge in lending activities, according to the CBN, was due to the increase in the number of microfinance banks on the NCR portal as well as increased participation of deposit money banks and non-bank financial institutions.
Lending under the NCR rose by 146 per cent to N1.2 trillion in 2018 from N487 million in 2017. As a result, the number of participating financial institutions in the NCR rose to 628 in 2018 from 103 in 2017.
Breakdown of participating financial institutions
The number of participating Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) rose to 21 from three in 2017, microfinance banks rose to 551 from 96, Development finance institution rose to four (4) from one(1), merchant banks rose four from one, finance companies rose to 13 from 2 while non interest bank rose to one from zero in 2017.
Analysis of lending by participating banks showed that DMBs led with N1.07 trillion, followed by Non-Bank Financial Institutions with N340.3 billion, Development Finance Institutions with N52 billion, MfBs with N21.6 billion, and Merchant Bank with N400 million.
