TBC Bank is a leading company in the region. It is distinguished with its utmost care for its clients, constant striving for novelty and everlasting pursuit for development. Success of TBC bank is conditioned by well-developed and diversified service channels, efficient sales system and high quality of the services provided.
How would you describe your bank's role in SMEs business journey considering their importance in the economy?
Over the years, TBC Bank has established itself as a leading partner for micro, small and medium enterprises by supporting their growth and development. As a partner, we cover all needs of SME businesses in daily banking, financing, and payments. Additionally, we have the largest business support program in the country – tools, education, mentorship, awareness building, special offers etc.
We look differently on specific sectors and stages in the SME lifecycle, offering the most relevant products in the most relevant formats. For example, we have a special program Startuperi (translation from Georgian – Startup Nation) for new businesses. Every component of the program (financial and non-financial) is designed based on business needs at the startup stage. Another good example is a similar program focused on Agri businesses. Using new segmentation and data analysis models, we were first to introduce subscription plans for business clients, making their daily banking easier and saving their costs. Business Plans are a unique model that combines a bundle of financial products and services with extensive non-financial offerings, such as exclusive face to face and group meetings, seminars, and workshops with market-leading specialists in various areas, as well as special offers from our partners.
As a customer-centric company, we are actively following market trends and regularly interact with/listen to our consumers closely, using different tools and research formats. This enables us to understand their needs and design best customer experience. We started active digitalization process several years before the pandemic. Since then, development of digital channels was one of the main priorities for us. During the pandemic, our leading digital channels proved to be very useful, allowing us to serve our clients remotely without any disruptions. Today, more than 60% of our active legal customers use business internet or mobile banking. In post pandemic world majority of SMEs want to engage with their banks through a variety of digital channels. We continue to work in this direction. We focus on decreasing time to credit, through digitalization, automatization and developing remote services. Plus, we leverage available data and gain a real-time understanding of our clients’ credit health. Overall, our goal is to stay differentiated by serving our clients through best-in-class distribution channels, offering innovative and affordable products and extensive non-financial services to further support their business development.
65% of all newly registered businesses in Georgia choose TBC, which is a testament to the company's reputation and trustworthiness among entrepreneurs
Why do you think your bank deserves to be awarded the SME Bank of the Year?
TBC is the #1 partner of choice for most businesses in the country. Currently, we serve 107k out of the total 202k (total number of registered businesses, source: business registry) businesses in Georgia – our market share is 52%. We have a leading position across every segment: micro, small and medium enterprises. Additionally, 65% of all newly registered businesses in Georgia choose TBC, which is a testament to the company's reputation and trustworthiness among entrepreneurs.
Our NPS is an impressive 85% (source: SME NPS Survey Q1 2023), indicating that the customers are highly satisfied with our services and are likely to recommend us to others. We introduced Business Guide position in our branches couple of years ago. This means that any business (that does not have a private business banker) can get the service of a specially trained professional, who navigates clients based on their needs. We also made it possible for Business Guides to register new businesses in our branches. This saves clients time and effort – they do not need to go to Justice House for business registration and then to the bank.
TBC has established itself as the #1 Business Supporter (source: SME Key Image Parameters Tracking Survey Q1 2023) in the minds of businesses in Georgia. This reputation is due to our unique full-scale business support programme consisting of educational resources, media support, business support tools, an annual business award, a start-up program etc. All these initiatives have earned us the trust and loyalty of our customers.
Q4 2022 highlights
around 87% of our active legal customers use business Internet or mobile banking
Briefly describe, what are top 3 projects/achievements delivered by your bank in the last 18 months for SME customers?
As we strive to support SME businesses of all sizes, this year we focused on increasing our presence among the smallest SME clients. We successfully launched fully automatic loan approvals so that loans up to GEL 100,000 could be approved automatically using pre-determined rules and a scoring model, thus decreasing the time-to-yes period from two days to only six hours. As a result, our loan portfolio in small businesses grew by 29.3% YoY in Q1 2022. For loans higher than 100 000 GEL we implemented a financial statement automatization tool, which automatically generates a business entity’s financial statements based on inputted data. This tool significantly speeds up the loan approval process, as well as eliminates the possibility of human error. As a result, the time to-yes decreased by around two days for these loans. Around 87% of our active legal customers use business Internet or mobile banking. We have also been actively upgrading our business app, which was launched in 2020 to make it more convenient for our SME clients. Several new features have been added to the app to better accommodate our customers’ needs, such as implementing a new module for utility payments and automatic payments as well as allowing transfers using any foreign currency. The Annual Business Award Ceremony, established back in 2015, aims to identify outstanding businesses in Georgia, help them develop, gain publicity and recognition, and inspire other entrepreneurs.
This year, the event was organized in partnership with VISA. The award campaign had more than 60 million impressions, while 51 were in digital channels and 5 million views in media. We also covered other channels like ATM and direct communications (Newsletter, SMS, Push Notification in IM/MB), moreover top of mind awareness reached 72%. Over the years, the ceremony has attracted more than 3,500 businesses from various fields.
