ICICI Bank, IBM, IFC Roll Out SME Toolkit

ICICI Bank, IBM and IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, together on August 7 rolled out an SME toolkit, an online resource centre, to help small and medium enterprises start, finance and grow their businesses. The India SME toolkit (www.india.smetoolkit.org) is a free online resource centre that contains the latest information and tools to enable SMEs in emerging markets learn how to increase their productivity, efficiency and capacity, as well as improve their access to capital and new markets, said the source. According to the source, the online service has 2,000 articles on global content as the need of SMEs is becoming global. There are 600 draft agreements which the SMEs can directly take from the website. Around 10,000 circulars and 20,000 notifications along with 3,600 forms of updated support systems for the would be available. The SME toolkit contains information and tools to address accounting and finance, business planning, human resources, legal and insurance, marketing and sales, operations, technology, business news and tenders information. The global resource for SME Toolkit is developed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the Workd Bankd, with technology support of IBM. Localisation of SME toolkit with local content, making it multi-lingual and integrating with mobile alerts has been undertaken by ICICI Bank.