More banks participate in SME loan initiative

KUALA LUMPUR: PARTNER 2, an initiative by The Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) to streamline the processes and procedures for loan applications by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has been rolled out to 10 commercial banks with another two banks to be added by year-end.

Source from (Business Times): http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/articles/abmpartner/Article/index_html
Published: July 19, 2013

The 10 banks are Affin Bank Bhd, AmBank (M) Bhd, Public Bank Bhd, Alliance Bank Malaysia Bhd, Hong Leong Bank Bhd, UOB (Malaysia) Bhd, Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank), RHB Bank Bhd, CIMB Bank Bhd, HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd. These banks are among the 13 members of ABM council banks.

"We will work with more banks to roll out the service. In fact, we are tying up collaboration with council banks. And we hope to finalise it with another two banks by year-end," ABM executive director Chuah Mei Lin said .

Thus far, the three banks that have yet to join the bandwagon are OCBC Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Citibank.


PARTNER 2 is a continuation of PARTNER in 2010. It continues to carry the mandate of enhancing banking efficiency and customer service, especially in SME loan applications.

"So far, all the feedbacks from SMEs have been addressed. We hope phase 3 (PARTNER 3) will not take such a long time and probably will be launched in 2014. It will encompass an enhancement of things that were carried out before," Chuah said.

The three key thrusts under the PARTNER 2 initiative are: a template to let SMEs understand the area they fail to satisfy in loan applications; pare down processing timeline of loan applications supported by Credit Guarantee Corporation Malaysia Bhd to a maximum of 52 days, or about seven-and-a-half weeks; a refined timeline of loan applications for straightforward cases to a maximum of 43 days from 70 days previously.

Participating banks will adopt the template of guidance, as a checklist to give applicants a better idea of the shortcomings and further strengthen the procedures.

Banking institutions are the core financing source for SMEs, representing 93.6 per cent of a total of RM190.7 billion loans from financial institutions, as at the end of February 2013. Approval rate was at 88.2 per cent.