IFC’s SME Finance Forum and Opportunity Network (ON) have agreed to collaborate to help small businesses form B2B partnerships, grow their business and expand to new markets.
The SME Finance Forum will invite its member banks catering to small businesses to join Opportunity Network’s community of Trusted Partners. The banks in turn will nominate their most trusted and capable small business clients to join the network and post and respond to B2B deals worth $1 million and above. The Opportunity Network currently has over 14,000+ CEOs, referred through trusted financial institutions, and hosted over $80 billion in deals. ON’s Trusted Partners include prestigious financial institutions and associations, such as Citizens Bank, London Stock Exchange Group, Caixa Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Eurobank, YPO, and Dentons.
“The SME Finance Forum is very excited about this new partnership. ON’s creative approach of using financial institutions as intermediaries to identify those SMEs most ready to take advantage of international market opportunities plays to our strengths in the SME Finance Forum. Hopefully we will be able to help ON accelerate its partnership building with those FIs for whom this platform best fits their SME sector growth strategy,” says Matt Gamser, CEO of the SME Finance Forum.
“We are excited to establish a partnership with SME Finance Forum. With its broad network of financial institutions and industry associations in developing countries we see strong synergies in working together to facilitate trade and investment to support the under-served SME segment. The partnership will also drive digitalisation [sic] of SME banking and strengthen our efforts to make the benefits of globalisation truly accessible to entrepreneurs and investors in emerging markets,” says Brian Pallas, CEO & Founder of Opportunity Network.
