Karl Toriola, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MTN Nigeria, has advised Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria to smartly adopt data to access capital.
Counselling SMEs in the course of a webinar, Toriola said they can take advantage of digitisation and smart use of data to have access to the funding they would need to scale up their businesses.
Toriola urged SMEs to make effective use of the data presented to them through telecommunication companies and financial systems as means to access capital.
“Data is abundant in both the telecommunications and financial ecosystems. The person that is going to make magic out of this is the person that can turn data into wisdom because the data is out there and not many people have successfully been able to transform and beneficially structure this data.
“If we convert data into wisdom, then I think we can create a magic formula that can transform the SME world and fix the problem about access to capital,” the MTN chief stated.
What you should know about SMEs
Almost 100% of registered businesses around the world are SMEs. Africa is no different. According to the World Bank, they provide for more than half of all jobs and account for more than a third of the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of emerging market economies.
Getting access to credit, however, is an uphill task for most of these SMEs. It is now widely established that lack of access to finance is the most significant constraint on the growth of small enterprises.
In developing economies, the estimated annual credit gap could be as much as $5.2 trillion.
