Entrepreneurship: The Backbone of Our Community

Every day we interact with businesses that make life as we know it happen. The taxi driver who takes you on your morning commute. The doctor’s office that helps you to manage the health of your loved ones. The digital storefront that is your convenient go-to to purchase gifts for special occasions. The grocery chain outlet located in your neighbourhood where you find fresh ingredients to make dinner or snacks from across the world for an evening treat. Indeed, there’s no getting around it. Entrepreneurs are the heart of our economy and the backbone of our community.

It’s for this reason that we celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, held this year from November 18-22, and along with the Global Entrepreneurship Network, we herald entrepreneurs everywhere. Celebrating the theme “Entrepreneurship is for Everyone”, this commemoration seeks to explore the ways we can make becoming an entrepreneur more accessible and to recognise what entrepreneurs do for us every day.

Here and all around the world, the businesses in our communities provide key goods and services, create employment, contribute to Gross Domestic Product and drive innovation. Their impact is not merely significant, it is tremendous.

Their growth, sustainability, enhanced competitiveness and expanded capacity for innovation benefits us all.

That’s why at Republic Bank, we believe that no business should be left behind. It is a resolution entrenched in our commitment to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Banking to support the achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) including SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. It’s also a conviction interwoven into our Environmental Social Governance approach that we do our part to ensure that all businesses are empowered for excellence.

Accordingly, we’ve made it a strategic priority to support businesses of all sizes, leveraging the strength and bearing we’ve built over 187 years of service to propel them further. It is critical that we do our part to dismantle the obstacles that hinder business and empower them to maximise their potential for the sustainable progress and prosperity of all people across the 16 territories in which we operate.

The Unseen Challenges for Entrepreneurs
While businesses play a pivotal role in driving economic development and growth, they inevitably face several obstacles that can hinder their growth and sustainability. These challenges, while often overlooked, are significant and multifaceted.
• Limited access to financial resources remains a significant hurdle as many entrepreneurs struggle to secure loans and investments due to stringent criteria and insufficient collateral. This snowballs and further affects crucial areas such as skills and training, infrastructure, and legalities, and forces them to leave blank spaces in their blueprints.
• Gaps in business skills training are another challenge, with entrepreneurs often lacking formal training in critical areas such as financial management, marketing, and strategic planning, which are essential for scaling their businesses effectively.
• The high cost of infrastructure, paired with inadequate infrastructure, further suppresses their growth, making it difficult for them to stabilize or expand operations.
• Regulatory barriers and lengthy legal processes can also stifle growth by delaying necessary approvals and permits.

Dismantling these limitations is crucial to creating an enabling environment where entrepreneurs can thrive, ensuring economic development, the steady creation of employment and creative exploration. Doing so requires a coordinated approach from several stakeholders, governments, industry associations and commercial banks like us at Republic Bank.

Doing Our Part to Empower Entrepreneurs to Overcome Challenges
With entrepreneurs in mind, we’re redesigning and enhancing our financial products and services, expanding our business development support and partnering with others for the empowerment of businesses.

1. Rethinking Our Financial Products and Services
Following extensive research and many insightful conversations with entrepreneurs, we’ve innovated to create financial products and services to better meet the needs of businesses. Products and services that reflect the understanding that businesses:
• have diverse business structures that range from family-run ventures to multi-country conglomerates
• need flexible qualification criteria to improve access to financing; and
• desire repayment terms that align with seasonal cash flows.

From these learnings we’ve launched our enhanced commercial loans for our business customers. For example, Republic Bank Barbados recently launched a business loan specially tailored for companies of different sizes, catering to their individual needs. For sustainable businesses with progressive business models that aim to drive the green transition, we’re investing and lending USD$200 million in climate financing by 2025. As of October 2024, we’ve achieved 83.49% of this target with businesses specialising in energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean transportation, waste management and environmental conservation among those benefitting. Moreover, we’ve allocated USD $100 million across the region in financing specific to agribusiness and more recently in Trinidad & Tobago, we’ve introduced our new agribusiness loan to better support agripreneurs.

As the Caribbean Development Bank notes that Micro Small and Medium Enterprises account for 70% to 85% of Caribbean businesses, we’ve also introduced a flagship MSME Micro Loan this year - making financing significantly accessible to every entrepreneur who has a dream. It is so important for us in the financial services sector to remember that many formidable, multi-country corporations were built from seemingly unassuming small businesses from streetside stalls, door-to-door salesmen, home-based startups and side hustles.

For me, as I steer decisions tailored for business financing, I try to keep at the forefront that, as with the people across the markets we serve, our businesses too have boundless untapped potential. Our job is support them in all the ways we can, including improving financing accessibility, to help them to achieve it.

2. Providing Entrepreneurs with Business Development Support
I had the opportunity to meaningfully engage with small business owners in our first MSME Empowerment Forum last August in Trinidad and Tobago. For each of them, their personal passion for their particular field was abundant. However, once they had launched, they found that running a business requires knowledge of a range of specialisations outside their areas of expertise such as accounting, marketing, sales and information technology. For larger companies with the ability to employ specialists, there are still challenges as they seek to enter new markets globally or make decision to bolster attractiveness to investors. In sum, beyond financing, businesses often need business development support.

That’s why it is imperative that financial institutions go beyond financing to providing counsel. The major way this is achieved is through building relationships characterised by trust, open communication and being available to navigate difficult times to eventually celebrate the wins. Providing stellar customer service is everything to us at Republic Bank. From Suriname to Ghana, and the 14 other territories that lie between, we’ve found that being present and engaged, and partnering with our customers to give our best advice, can have a significant effect on them successfully attaining their goals.

In addition to strong customer relationships, we also strive to offer more structured training programmes targeted to different business customer segments. Our online SME Toolkit works well for small business owners who need quick access to guidance at any time. Together with Caribbean Export, we host export capacity building programmes for companies both big and small seeking to expand by entering new markets. For youth, we recently facilitated a workshop for youth entrepreneurs in the British Virgin Islands which gave them the tools and knowledge to effectively run a business. And in the Cayman Islands, we sponsor the Cayman Islands Centre for Business Development, connecting with entrepreneurs and sharing tailored solutions for successful, resilient businesses. These are some illustrations of our emphasis on building strong relationships with our customers. Indeed, this is critical for delivering the personalised support they need to thrive. By offering thoughtful guidance, being consistently available, and maintaining clear communication, we are dedicated to providing exceptional service every step of the way.

3. Cultivating Community Through Networking and Exposure
According to Forbes, networking is crucial for a successful business. The right opportunity or key connections can have an exponentially positive impact on entrepreneurs seeking to grow and scale. Therefore, another way financial institutions can provide entrepreneurs with support is to facilitate forums for networking. For example, we make possible the pitch competition at the Fintech Islands conference to give promising tech entrepreneurs a platform for further investment. We’ve also coordinated several expos across our territories understanding that one simple interaction or conversation is all it takes to propel an entrepreneur’s ideas forward. Last September, our Republic Bank Sustainability Expo was a solid example of creating a platform for making the right connections.

Another way we cultivate an enabling environment for entrepreneurs is through advocacy, raising our voice in support among stakeholders who can be of influence.

Fueling Growth
For me and for our team at Republic Bank, commitment to supporting entrepreneurs goes beyond financial services – it’s about empowering them with the tools, advice, training, and community required to overcome challenges and succeed. After all, entrepreneurship is for everyone, and it benefits everyone and so we hope that with ongoing support and the right opportunities, our entrepreneurs will be better equipped to innovate, grow and drive sustainable economic progress. More than anything, we want to support them in the same dedicated way they support us, making our everyday lives happen.

So, we’ll keep doing our part to help our businesses truly shine as the backbone of our community.

This article is one of a five-part commemorative series by Republic Bank in celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2024. To read all, visit https://republictt.com/republic-journal