It appears that Guyana is not the only country in the Caribbean where the micro- and small-business sectors have an enduring grouse with financial institutions over the quality of customer service that they receive.
The October 9 issue of the Jamaican daily, The Observer, reports that small businesses in the sister CARICOM country also have a ‘beef’ with the banks for what, the newspaper reports the disgruntled business owners say is “the poor service being meted out” to them.
The concerns, according to the Observer report, would appear to have arisen during the newspaper’s recent Business Forum when claims by banks that they have ‘raised their game’ and that they have added to their suite of services “new products targeted at members of the vulnerable sector,” still left “a majority of businesses dissatisfied with the current levels of engagement.”
Some of the grouses of the Jamaican small business sector appear to bear a striking resemblance to complaints that have been voiced for years by small business owners and would-be business owners in Guyana who have been complaining about ‘profiling’ in the process of handling customers seeking business loans.
When the Stabroek Business raised this matter with a handful of local small businesses a few days ago they confirmed that they were aware that this was “an issue” in Guyana. Local small businesses indeed felt that they had experienced what they believed to be unfair prejudices in the banks’ processing of small-business loan applications. Local business owners say, however, that with various other borrowing avenues having opened up here in Guyana, what used to be seen as profiling is less prevalent within the local banking system these days.
Jamaican small businesses, meanwhile, still experience the same problem and the Observer report says that the unhappy small-business owners have reportedly pressed their Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME’s) Association into action on the issue. The organisation’s president, Donavan Wignall, would appeared to have joined the ‘conversation’, alluding, according to the Observer report, to “what he believes to be a general customer service crisis affecting the country,” and pointing to what he sees as the need for “urgent redress… if businesses are to move forward with efficiency”.
Wignall is also on record as saying that the issue of “better customer service in the banking sector” was currently being actively championed by the Small Business Association of Jamaica (SBAJ).
Here in Guyana, disgruntled Guyanese small-business owners, lacking as they do a single cohesive small business ‘umbrella’ organisation to champion their various causes including the quality of the service that they receive from the banking sector, have been unable to generate any serious collective protest over what some of them say is the prejudiced position of some banking institutions. Much of this, small business owners have said to this newspaper, repeatedly, has to do with what they perceive to be unfair prejudices in the evaluation of loan applications, not least what some of them see as profiling.
Utilising the mechanism of their local small business representative body, however, Jamaicans have gone a different route. Wignall is quoted in the Observer as saying that “if it is that the banks being the way they are, should continue on the same path, then some alternate means of financing has to be found or the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) will have to step in to ensure that there is some basic level of customer service.”
