By CHEN HUIFEN

DESPITE challenging economic times, OCBC Bank is committed to investing in solutions for the emerging business owners, having spent more than $10 million since 2006 on coming up with products focusing on them.

'That (more than $10 million) goes into infrastructure of branches, IT, customer relationship management systems, people, channels,' said Tan Chor Sen, head of the bank's emerging business unit. 'As we talk, we are still investing more. And our investment has been very constant despite the crisis.'

By emerging businesses, the bank is referring to small enterprises with turnover of less than $10 million a year. The strategy to focus on this sub-segment of the SME sector started about five years ago, when the promotion of entrepreneurship came into full swing and the notion of starting and growing a business as a career saw increased acceptance.

However, the bank had little experience serving the sector then, so Mr Tan and his team embarked on what is now known as the 'Walk with Customers' exercise. They shadowed business owners - each for half to a whole day - to find out their aspirations, frustrations and challenges.

'We realised that some of the things that we think they need are not actually what they want,' said Mr Tan. 'At the end of the day, we came to a few conclusions: businessmen are very busy; they want things to be kept simple, fast and convenient. They also want to be respected as a business owner.'

Based on those principles, the bank started designing solutions. One of the most notable was the same-day corporate account opening. Launched in 2007, it was viewed as a significant improvement from the traditional model, in which customers would have to prepare multiple documents on their own before they walk into a bank, and being amateurs, they may not get it right the first time.

As retold by Mr Tan, the feedback from SME owners was: 'If you really want to help us, don't ask us to do things. You do it for us.'

He added: 'So we challenged ourselves, and now what happens? The customer doesn't even have to prepare beforehand. They just bring their IC, and a cheque or cash of $500. You walk in and half an hour later, you walk out with a cheque book and you can actually sign immediately.'

A business specialist at the bank will do all the necessary paperwork and process the application.

Apart from this, other innovative solutions catering to small business owners included an e-Alert service that notifies customers about the flow of funds in their account through SMS or e-mail; FlexCash, a non-collateral financing solution for loans up to $200,000; and quick cheque deposit boxes at industrial parks and petrol kiosks.

More recently, the bank came up with a BizProtect Plan, a standardised insurance product catering to the needs of entrepreneurs of retail, clinic, restaurant, motor workshop, manufacturing/engineering and trading/logistics operations.

'As we talked to customers, we realised that business owners have no insurance or are under-insured,' said Mr Tan. 'And some of them are not even aware that by law, they are supposed to have certain business insurance. That came as a surprise to us. So we came up with a package.'

The result has been a five-fold increase in the acquisition of small business owners since 2006. Over at its Ubi Business Banking Centre, which opened in July last year, the bank claims that every one in two businesses in the Ubi-Paya Lebar vicinity is a customer.

For its efforts, OCBC recently attained the Singapore Innovation Class certification. Administered by Spring Singapore, it is the niche standard for innovation management. OCBC's emerging business unit is the first customer-facing unit of a commercial bank to win this award.

'Our history has shown that we are a business bank and we have supported SMEs throughout all these years,' said Mr Tan. 'We'd like to extend that and engage them (SME owners) from day one, and grow (with them) along the way so that when they are bigger, their record is with us - we understand them better, we can support them better.

This article was first published in The Business Times.