• SME News
Credit Monitoring Service To Beef Up Credit Rating For SMEs
PETALING JAYA, Feb 11 (Bernama) -- SME Credit Bureau (M) Sdn Bhd, which provides credit reports for small businesses, has launched the country's first credit monitoring service (CMS) to beef up credit ratings of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Bureau director, Datuk David Chua, said CMS was a powerful and affordable way for SMEs to stay on top of their credit rating.
"The system will monitor key changes in banking, business and trade credit information as well as credit ratings of SMEs," he told Bernama here Thursday. These changes in data would then be sent out as e-mail alerts to SMEs who subscribe to the service, he said.
"The launch of CMS on Feb 1 will help address the perception of SME sector being high-risk borrowers," Chua said. He said the CMS allowed financial institutions and other lenders to have an easy access to timely, accurate and reliable credit information on SMEs.
"This will help lenders to facilitate faster credit evaluations while speeding up financing activities," he said. Chua, however, said the credit ratings issued would not provide any recommendation to either extend or deny credit to SMEs, but instead offer value-added propositions.
He said the bureau expected to sign up 12,000 new subscribers this year. It currently has 26,500 SMEs and 38 financial institutions among its members. Subscribers are charged a nominal fee of RM50 per year, or 12 sen a day, for the CMS service.
SME Credit Bureau's chief executive officer, Alex Lim, said the information in CMS were extracted from Companies Commission of Malaysia and Bank Negara Malaysia. "By using the CMS, we gauge the ability of SMEs to repay the loans over the next 12 months based on their performance and payment behaviour over the past 12 months," he said, adding that the information had been updated since two years ago. -- BERNAMA
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