Awards for Excellence 2020
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Singapore’s banks have dominated this award in recent years and for good reason. The super-stable city state boasts a trio of excellent lenders, all geared toward helping its army of small and medium-sized enterprises flourish.
This year, the award for Asia’s best bank for SMEs goes to UOB. The Wee family-run lender is cautious and conservative, values coveted by small businesses, particularly during troubling times like these.
Though the coronavirus appears to be slowly ebbing in Asia, smaller firms face a hard year or two ahead and support from their primary lenders is crucial.
In an interview with Euromoney in July 2019, UOB chief executive Wee Ee Cheong said the bank’s private-sector roots led it to focus on SMEs, noting that “the DNA of UOB is small and medium-sized customers.”
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Lawrence Loh |
In total, UOB reckons it banks 274,000 SME clients scattered across Asia – and its regional reach continues to grow. Last year it opened a new branch in the capital of Vietnam, Hanoi, and its seventh office in the Greater Bay Area region straddling Hong Kong and Guangdong province in the transport hub of Zhongshan.
“As SMEs grow domestically and across borders, their needs become increasingly complex,” notes head of group commercial banking Eric Tham.
Financially, UOB is in good shape. In 2019, the bank posted a loan-to-deposit ratio of 85.4%; for the SME banking segment, that number rises to 99%. Outstanding loans to smaller firms rose 9% year on year in 2019, to S$61 billion ($43.8 billion), with net profit generated by SME clients expanding by 11.6% on an annualized basis.
New initiatives abound. Last year, UOB launched The Business Circle, a regional community of next-generation business leaders; in the spring of 2019 it led a delegation of 26 SMEs to the OurCrowd Global Investor Summit in Israel, giving them first-hand exposure to venture capital firms and cutting-edge technologies.
Data and digital initiatives are key. Its BizSmart service, an integrated management solution, helps firms to “manage their business in the safety of their own home,” says Lawrence Loh, head of group business banking at UOB.
Its BizMerchant programme, unveiled last year in Vietnam, extends financing to firms operating on e-commerce platforms including Lazada and Shopee.
In 2019 the bank launched its U-Solar programme, with the aim of driving renewable energy adoption across Asia and of cutting the electricity costs of its SME clients by a quarter.
