More than 80 SMEs require banks to “meet the needs”

A group of more than 80 groups, chambers, federations, and confederations of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises joined together to demand that the financial system “rise to the needs of those of us who produce.”

In a joint statement, they claimed to find mechanisms to “avoid cutting the payment chain” of the SMEs, in the face of the drop in activity caused by the isolation ordered by the Government to stop the advance of the coronavirus.

In this regard, they stressed that not only the public sector should absorb the effort to support companies.

“Those who have had significant gains in recent years, must also say present and find mechanisms to overcome, in the best and fastest way, the effects of inactivity,” the statement highlighted.

According to the analysis of these entities, in the banks there are 220,000 million pesos in checks, of which between 35 percent and 40 percent expire in April, when economic activity has not yet been normalized. To this, we must add the documents in the portfolio that were not deposited and the invoices issued that should have been collected in this period.

According to these entities, the first link that will suffer inactivity is commerce; the second is the wholesale distributor or the SME industry and the third is the medium or large supplier company.

These are some of the claims:

• That financial institutions act as credit banks and that they cover the checks of compliant clients.
• That they grant a “logical and possible” term for this debt. For this, they ask to take as a reference the 24 percent rate offered by the Government.
• That if necessary, the Central Bank modify regulations so that the bank can operate automatically.
• Reprofile the debts of the SMEs with the financial entities and the maturities that can block the orders.

The statement is signed by SMEs metallurgical and auto parts, footwear, hardware, hydrocarbons, among other items and confederations and entities from different Argentine provinces.