Made easy: Getting business loans from the banks

By Nwankwo Onyinye

Following our concluded series on basic requirements for accessing a loan at the Bank of Industry, BoI, we now turn to commercial banks to look into their funding services for the Small & Medium Enterprises, SMEs.

Again, as stated when we began the BoI series the information contained in this series would not represent all that each bank requires for you to be successful in getting a business loan. You still require seeking more detailed information, which may be specific to your type of business or your specific business case.
Naira

We are starting this series with one of the banks prominent in SME banking, Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc. We shall be discussing other banks, a total of eight, in the weeks ahead under the same template being used for Stanbic IBTC.
One of the key offers to SMEs in Stanbic IBTC is what they called, SME Overdraft.

The bank says its business overdraft helps you make payments from your business current account even when the amount exceeds the available cash balance.  This means that you can utilise amount more than you have in your bank account for the purpose of your business transactions only.

It covers short-term financing requirements only and the bank says it is easy to arrange.
The overdraft would be structured such that you pay interest only on the money you use, not on the full amount which you requested and was approved as your limit.

The value of this offer is that it is a convenient way to deal with unexpected spending and bills in the day-to-day running of your business.
It is also a flexible form of credit where you can use the money at any time during your agreed overdraft term.
You only pay interest on the amount you used and not on the whole loan approved.

Next week we conclude this with basic requirements for Stanbic IBTC SME Overdraft, and also delve into some other offers from the bank.