At the 48^th World Chief Financial Officers Congress in HCM City on Friday, the AsiaInvest Group and MoolahSense signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly launch a digital lending platform to benefit small and medium-sized enterprises in Viet Nam.

“This is an opportunity for SMEs and start-ups in Viet Nam to have a transparent and effective funding source when loans from local banks are limited and hard to access,” Nguyen Ngoc Bach, chairman and CEO of AsiaInvest, said.

The MOU puts in place a roadmap to establish a joint venture that taps into their respective strengths to provide tech-driven financing solutions to address the financing gap plaguing small business in the country.

According to the 2017 economic census by the General Statistics Office of Viet Nam, there were 517,900 businesses in the country, 98 per cent of them SMEs which account for 40 per cent of GDP and 50 per cent of jobs.

But according to the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, only 30 per cent of SMEs have access to loans from the formal sector while the rest still have to use their own funds or depend on unregulated loans.

The joint venture lending platform is expected to change that.

Established in Singapore in 2013, MoolahSense has received a full capital markets services licence in its home market.

It has so far lent over US$51.4 million to more than 600 companies with loan sizes ranging from $36,700 to $1.47 million.

With a network of 14,000 registered investors, the platform has offered instantaneous funding to some of its SME borrowers to grow their business.

Borrowers can either procure their funds with a fixed rate or subject their rate to the market via a reverse Dutch auction mechanism. Investors can subscribe to an auto-allocation algorithm to ensure that their portfolio will be diversified across multiple SMEs across various sectors. — VNS