JS Bank
For the third year in a row, JS Bank is Asiamoney’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because of its unwavering focus on this part of the market during a particularly tough period.
Its SME-targeted products are aplenty. They range from short-term working capital business loans of up to PRs50 million ($318,000) at a subsidized mark-up rate of 6% per annum, to what it calls the Taraqi SME loan to improve capacity at SMEs.
JS Bank, whose CEO is veteran banker Basir Shamsie, has also focused on building a women-led client base by financing over 1,500 businesses run by women.
It has offered rural businesswomen a new financing tool called JS Khud Mukhtar, while also providing seed money to women entrepreneurs at concessional rates. It aims to empower 10,000 women entrepreneurs by the end of 2022.
As Pakistan’s third-largest SME bank with a portfolio of more than PRs42 billion from over 20,000 clients, JS Bank left no stone unturned when it came to modernizing its offerings. Some of the key rollouts recently were digitizing payroll disbursements and internal employee management systems at firms.
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