Funding Societies Expands Financing Access For MSMEs With Third Credit Facility

Funding Societies, Southeast Asia’s largest unified digital finance platform for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) has announced that they have signed a third credit facility with HSBC under its ASEAN Growth Fund.

The overall transaction totalled over US$100 million (RM436 million), and it also includes the two annual credit facilities already extended to Funding Societies.

Provide credit access to underserved MSME

This transaction reaffirms HSBC’s commitment towards MSMEs through the Funding Societies platform, a relationship that has been in place since 2022.

This transaction between HSBC and Funding Societies is amongst HSBC’s largest asset-backed secured facilities extended to digital SME lenders in Southeast Asia, and will help extend Funding Societies reach to providing credit access to underserved MSME segments in the region.

MSMEs are some of the biggest contributors to GDP

In a press release, Funding societies also stated that while the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region has grown its middle-class and gained tremendous traction in terms of increasing access to formal banking services and digitalising its commercial environment.

However, there is still a sizable credit access gap, especially taking into account the amount contributed by MSMEs to each country’s gross domestic product.

To put things in persepctive, MSMEs contribute anywhere from 35% to 69% of the GDP of each country in the APAC region.

In a press release, co-founder and Group CEO of Funding Societies, Kelvin Teo, said, “The continued support from a global bank such as HSBC is a testament to its commitment to support the development of digital platform businesses such as ours and MSMEs as we ride through a two-decade high interest rates impacting the global economy. This enables us to further explore scalable debt financing for growth and profitability, and bolster financial inclusion for the underbanked and underserved SMEs in the region.”

Since its inception in 2015, Funding Societies has disbursed over US$4 billion (RM17.4 billion) in business financing, positively impacting more than 100,000 businesses across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as processed an annualised US$1.4 billion (RM6.1 billion) payments GTV (gross transaction value) since its entry into payments in late 2022.