Enhancing the access to capital markets for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) has begun with the operations of its fully-fledged merchant banking to benefit the expanding number of growth oriented enterprises, said an official at an interactive workshop organized by the bank on July 25 in Mumbai.

The workshop aimed at sharing ideas, issues, constraints, suggestions for addressing the challenges in MSMEs, especially those with a strong technology and innovation quotient, accessing capital through the SME Exchanges or the Institutional Trading Platform (ITP) of BSE and NSE.

SIDBI has supported over 125 Venture Capital Funds and thus finds an extended service for listing the investee companies in SME exchanges through its merchant banking operations.

“SIDBI, by virtue of direct credit assistance for nearly two decades, also has a good number of such MSMEs who would like to list in the SME exchanges. It is this strength that we would like to utilise by connecting the right investment opportunity to the funds and also would like to help these funds with exit opportunities at attractive valuations,” said SIDBI Deputy Managing Director Ajay K Kapur.

The Deputy MD is bullish that the significant increase in number of venture funds active in startups/MSME space, since 2015, will create large pipe of fast growing companies seeking public markets, which may prove beneficial to the SME exchange as well as investors seeking liquidity or exit.

“SIDBI has been constantly inventing and reorienting itself for bringing out appropriate solutions for varied needs of MSMEs and its current focus is on stepping up its role to provide entire gamut of value added services and interventions in this space to supplement and complement various risk capital, venture debt and growth equity assistance programmes of SIDBI,” said Kapur.