Quality JA

Small and medium businesses (SMEs) while being the engine of growth, often miss opportunities for faster growth. Their risk rating is difficult to assess and therefore they do not always get approved for needed capital. Due to limited capital, they are also unable to leverage technology to grow and expand their business operations.

This environment created an opportunity for a new concept – QualityJA.

Quality-JA

This concept was delivered by winning a globally competitive bid for the Scotiabank Enterprise-Wide Risk Management & Finance Programme for Small and Medium Enterprises (SERMaF). This project was undertaken by the Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica Limited (Scotiabank Jamaica) funded by Inter-American Development Bank/Multilateral Investment Fund (IDB/MIF).

QualityJA provided 3 main benefits to the SMEs:

  1. Provide SMEs with a unique web address to highlight their products and services for free. Which they could in turn use to promote themselves and make offers
  2.  Specific bids and requests for proposals from both the public and private sector would be released exclusively through this platform
  3. Maintain a brand equity counter to help highlight the level of interest the public is displaying in the brand and its products or services.

There were two noteworthy elements of the broader SERMaF programme that were layered into the QualityJA platform:

  1. The inclusion of a risk rating number through a business process audit. This number served as a base for financial institutions to evaluate the SMEs
  2. The businesses that gained access to the platform were those that went through a comprehensive training programme and received their risk rating number.