#sme-finance

#sme-finance

Every week, I speak with SME owners who tell me the same thing: they need funding urgently, but every door they knock on seems to slam shut. The rejections pile up, the frustration mounts, and inevitably, they conclude that lenders simply aren't lending. The numbers bear out their frustration. The Federation of Small Businesses reports that only one in ten small businesses rate the availability and affordability of finance as good, with over half rating it as poor.

The way Saudi entrepreneur Mohammed Aldossary sees it, innovators are animated by the same motivations whether they are in Silicon Valley, the Arabian Peninsula, or South Asia: They want to solve vexing problems at scale. "What excites talent, what excites the community, is to go build around those needs," Aldossary told the Fortune Global Forum on Sunday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.