Bridging the trade financing gap for Sri Lankan MSMEs, with Lakshan De Silva

Recycling is a good thing, right? Well, in that case, let me recycle this from yesterday’s show notes. Most consumers borrow to manage expenses. It’s different for SMEs, though, who often borrow to drive income. As such, being denied credit is not just about having their lifestyle curtailed, it’s about having the business growth, and sometimes even their business survival, put at risk.

“When iloan launched back in 2018, the lending market in Sri Lanka was $5 billion, almost 40% was which was raised from loan sharks and individuals who have very dubious practices of charging excessive interest rates, as well as very unpleasant collection methods”. Lakshan da Silva is a Sri Lankan serial entrepreneur whose goal is to fix this for mom and pop stores around the island.

Lakshan is very approachable on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakshan-de-silva-a9b11328/

Or you can look into his many ventures:

iLoan is at https://www.iloan.lk/

HyperGlase is at https://hyperglade.com/

Spectrify is at http://www.spectrifyai.com/

Also, and I really hate to link this, but if you’re interested in the terrible cricket game in question, you can see the drama here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeOX9AAJXg (I hate-watched it, and was just reminded that poor old Lance Klusener was involved again, that guy deserved better)

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

And finally, if you’re in need of more banking podcasts, you can find related content at https://blog.feedspot.com/banking_podcasts/

Regards,

Brendan

The full written transcript, with timestamps, will follow when I’m back next week.