Kuala Lumpur, 2 July 2015 – Credit Guarantee Corporation Malaysia Berhad (CGC) was recently accorded the Development Award 2015 by the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific (ADFIAP) in recognition of its forward-looking Islamic Wholesale Guarantee (WG-i) scheme.

CGC President and Chief Executive Officer Mohd Zamree Mohd Ishak received the Award at the ADFIAP Awards Night during the 38th ADFIAP Annual Meeting in Nha Trang, Vietnam.

“The WG-i scheme launched in April 2014 is the country’s first Islamic SME wholesale guarantee scheme, providing companies with access to unsecured business financing. The innovative financing scheme was developed to ensure that banks continue to have the ability to lend to SMEs with the benefit of a CGC guarantee.

“To date, about RM500 million worth of SME financing in the books of OCBC Al-Amin has been guaranteed by CGC, benefitting more than two thousand SMEs,” Zamree said.

“CGC has been in the forefront of SME development in Malaysia, successfully providing the much needed financing to dynamic SMEs over the past four decades. The ADFIAP award for our WG-i is testimony to our ability and expertise in developing and delivering innovative financing products that can have a great impact on SME growth and outreach,” added Zamree.

The award for WG-i is the second to be accorded to CGC by ADFIAP. In 2012, CGC received ADFIAP’s Development Award for its Portfolio Guarantee (PG) Scheme under the SME Development category.

“The PG was first launched in 2009 and, since then, we have successfully rolled out 45 tranches of PG in collaboration with 13 banks. To date, a total of RM2.5 billion worth of SME financing has been availed through the PG benefitting about 5,800 SMEs,” added Zamree.

The Wholesale Guarantee-i (WG-i), involving OCBC Al-Amin Bank’s existing unsecured SME portfolio sees the ratio of risk involved in the financing of businesses being shared equally between CGC and OCBC Al-Amin Bank for a guarantee period of five years. Previously, the entire risk centred on the Bank.

Congratulating CGC on the Award, OCBC Al-Amin Director and CEO Syed Abdull Aziz Syed Kechik said the WG-i has given rise to a new phase in the development of Malaysia’s unsecured business financing efforts and could not have taken off without the commitment, leadership and foresight shown by CGC.

“By agreeing to share the risk equally for OCBC Al-Amin’s Business Cash Financing-i shortly after we launched it, CGC paved the way for us to confidently move forward to make the product even more accessible to the SMEs,” he said.

The WG-i, which currently centres on OCBC Al-Amin Bank Berhad’s (OCBC Al-Amin) unsecured financing product Business Cash-i (BC-i), was introduced last year. The BC-i was developed in line with the increasing appetite from SMEs for unsecured term financing to fulfil their short to medium term business financing needs

Earlier this year, CGC and OCBC Al-Amin announced that they are upping WG-i,   the country’s first and only Islamic SME wholesale guarantee, to RM1 billion before the end of this year.

The first two tranches totalling RM500 million have effectively guaranteed more than two thousand businesses from industries ranging from retail and wholesale to manufacturing, with the number expected to double before the end of the year with the introduction of the additional tranches.