‘MSME Prerana’ – Indian Bank’s mentoring programme for MSMEs.

A unique initiative, MSME Prerana is an online business mentoring programme for small business owners. A programme by the Indian Bank, a public sector bank, was launched by the Union Minister of Finance & Corporate Affairs, Nirmala Sitharaman, at the bank’s headquarters in Chennai. 

An integrated initiative with Poornatha & Co, MSME Prerana aims to empower entrepreneurs by facilitating skill development and capacity-building workshops. The state-run bank in a statement mentioned that the programme is to be made available in local languages and using simple terminologies to overcome the persisting language barrier. 

Through the analysis of the bank’s interaction with the MSME units, they observed that there is a huge dependency of MSMEs on Chartered Accountants or agents to access bank loans and to scale up their operations.

With an objective to bridge the gap existing in the skill sets, the programme is spread over 12 sessions to enable MSME entrepreneurs to acquire expertise in:

• Handling finance and managerial skills 
• Capacity to handle crises in business
• Understand the dynamics of credit rating 
• Risk management

Managerial and financial sessions will be directed by Poornatha & Co, while the bank will oversee the sessions on banking-related topics.

The participants on successfully completing the programme will receive a certificate, issued jointly by Indian Bank, Poornatha & Co and MADE (Michigan Academy for Developing Entrepreneurs), US.

The bank states that it is the first bank in the country to present such an out-of-the-box initiative for the MSME sector. Union minister, Sitharaman wishes that “this novel initiative shall further inspire others in the banking sector to adopt similar measures”. 

Read details about the news here.