Emirates NBD has successfully exported its small and medium-sized business banking operations from the UAE to its other core markets of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, creating a regional SME banking champion.
Its group head of business banking is Rohit Garg.
This is demonstrated across many areas of its conventional and Islamic banking businesses, which incorporate an innovative range of products supported by operational infrastructure that ensures the process of banking for SMEs is as efficient as possible.
This starts at the beginning, where new SME customers can be digitally onboarded via the bank’s E20 mobile app, providing them with a business account within 10 minutes.
Last year, the bank opened over 7,000 new business accounts for new SMEs and startups, and provided over $1 billion-equivalent in funding to support working capital, operational and capital expenditure needs.
Overall lending to SMEs rose 43% compared with the previous 12 months, helping to deliver an 88% lift in SME banking revenue and impressive growth of 105% in net profit versus 2022.
Contributing to this performance was the bank’s expanded regional asset coverage teams, which included a new team for trade and working capital and real-estate lending.
A key piece in the bank’s SME proposition is its digital platform – called businessONLINE. The platform covers all the transactional needs of SMEs, providing financial dashboards for their business accounts, as well as covering remittances, cash-management solutions, and newly launched solutions for API connectivity and host-to-host services.
One of the most important developments last year was the launch of smartTRADE, the bank’s trade-finance portal, which enables customers to manage all their trade-financing requirements in one place.
Using the portal, customers can place their requests for letters of credit, guarantees, trade-loan requests and receive real-time updates on their transactions via email and SMS notifications.
Overall lending to SMEs rose 43% compared with the previous 12 months, helping to deliver an 88% lift in SME banking revenue
This digital capability is made all the more powerful by the international footprint of the bank, which includes important import and export markets such as the UK, China, India, Singapore and Indonesia – countries where the bank has a branch or representative office. The international reach is even larger when including the network of DenizBank, which Emirates NBD acquired in 2019.
Such regional and international coverage is an important strength of the bank, enabling it to help support and connect its SME client base to core trading markets through conventional and Islamic banking services.
Last year, Emirates Islamic, the Islamic banking arm of Emirates NBD, launched the Emirati Absher Business Account, designed exclusively to provide a comprehensive suite of premium banking solutions for Emirati startups.
