Setting aside the customary ‘one off’ encounters between buyers and sellers designed to facilitate product-promotion and, more importantly, the rare but valued market for small businesses in several sectors, this weekend’s UNCAPPED event billed for the National Stadium at Providence, will provide an opportunity for innovative but still insufficiently embraced entrepreneurial enterprises to encounter representatives of the banking sector in the hope of cutting through the thicket of bureaucracy that continues to limit access for small businesses to financing for growth and expansion.
Almost certainly, though, it is unlikely that the representatives of the banking sector will turn up at Providence on Sunday with an altered script to that which has been read to small business owners attending the UNCAPPED event over the years. The fact that they have been invited to put in an appearance again this year, however, suggests that the organizers of the event, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) are still hopeful that there can be some sort of modus vivendi between the small cash-starved businesses and commercial banks that continue to assert that concern for their shareholders’ interests conditions their posture on small businesses that seemingly lack the wherewithal to comply with their lending conditions, which, the banks say, cannot be underpinned by a disposition of benevolence.
