Funding Societies Malaysia, the SME digital financing platform which operates in Southeast Asia has announced that it has achieved RM1 billion disbursement in business financing across more than 17,000 financing deals.
This milestone comes as the platform enters its 5th year of operations in the country, the company states that learning from the challenges and uncertainties it faced in the past two years has made it in a better position to react and to adjust its business model and risk underwriting which resulted in 100% growth of financing deals in 2021 compared to the previous year, while maintaining a default rate of around 3%.
Commenting on the milestone, Wong Kah Meng, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Funding Societies Malaysia, said, “The pandemic has paved a new era of digital inclusion. This simultaneously allows us to scale further in reaching out to more of these creditworthy MSMEs, in line with their increased awareness on digital financing platforms. This RM1 billion disbursement milestone is a reflection of the thousands of underserved creditworthy SMEs we have supported over the years, not just in Malaysia, but also across Southeast Asia.”
Its inaugural regional impact study released late last year which surveyed the platform’s impact on Singapore’s, Malaysia’s, and Indonesia’s economies found that 72% of the respondents said their revenues would decrease if not for Funding Societies’ business financing. Meanwhile, 84% of the surveyed businesses had used the financing as working capital to pay for overheads, inventory, and business equipment, which were all crucial in their efforts to sustain operations.
