The Chief Executive Officer of MTN Nigeria, Mr. Karl Toriola has stressed the need for smart adoption of data by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria, insisting that early adoption will transform the growth of SMEs business in Nigeria.

Toriola who made the assertion during the recent Sparkle’s webinar for SMEs themed, ‘Simplifying Support for Small Businesses’, shed light on how digitization and smart use of data could help SMEs transform their business and improve access to capital.

More than 95 per cent of registered businesses around the world are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Africa is no different. According to the World Bank, they provide for more than half of all jobs and account for more than a third of the combined GDP of emerging market economies.

Getting access to credit, however, is an uphill task for most of these SMEs. It is now widely established that lack of access to finance is the most significant constraint on the growth of small enterprises. In developing economies, the estimated annual credit gap could be as much as $5.2trn.

Speaking on access to funding for SMEs at the Sparkle webinar, Toriola urged SMEs to take advantage of the data presented to them through telecommunication companies and financial systems as means to access capital.

“Data is abundant in both the telecommunications and financial ecosystems. The person that is going to make magic out of this is the person that can turn data into wisdom because the data is out there and not many people have successfully been able to transform and beneficially structure this data. If we convert data into wisdom, then I think we can create a magic formula that can transform the SME world and fix the problem about access to capital,” Toriola said.