Nedbank offers new opportunity network service – and its free for now

Despite the potential of being greylisted looming over South Africans heads – which will in turn making doing business in international markets more difficult with additional administrative burdens, Nedbank is still working to grow the economy by providing a service to link up local businesses with international clients and vice versa.

Mark Rose, Experienced Head of Strategic and New Business Development at Nedbank Commercial Banking, provided more insight into its partnership with the global deal-matchmaking platform, Opportunity Network. 

Connecting businesses through the Opportunity Network platform

Opportunity Network is a digital deal-matching platform that connects over 50 000 selected businesses and private investors to business opportunities in over 140 countries with a $500 billion transaction flow at no additional cost.

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All its members are screened by prestigious financial institutions, professional services firms, and associations worldwide, so Nedbank clients who will utilise this service have the peace of mind of knowing they are dealing with a vetted business or client.

“We want to be known as the financial experts to the commercial banking market on their growth aspirations, and in commercial banking,” Rose explained.

As such, the bank has now looked at structuring solutions that potentially go beyond banking.

“This is a niche service appealing to those established business clients of ours who are looking for growth. These clients are established in SA but they are saturated. But they still have serious growth aspirations in that they looking to at expanding to other markets.

“How do they go about accessing markets – over and above the traditional methods of physically going into another country and setting up meetings and tradeshows which is cumbersome and costly? This is where our value-added services through the Opportunity Network come in,” Rose explained.  

Meeting the specific criteria

Through Opportunity Network, the bank thereby had found a much more seamless way of providing opportunities to connect clients in markets that they are not established in.

The bank provides this service – in access to the platform and network –  free of charge to its commercial clients that met a very specific criteria. But it was a very specific criteria.

These were normally established family-owned businesses (that have usually been passed down from generation to generation) that saw an annual turnover of between R50million and R2.5 billion. It was important to note that the focus group was not start-up but businesses that were established for around 15 to 20 years.

“These are not our corporate clients, they are just below corporate,” Rose also explained.

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“We have a definitive focus on specific industry sectors within this setup. We have customised banking propositions to select industry sectors. These are retail franchising, agriculture, manufacturing, professional fraternities, and lastly public sector. As such, we have customised banking products to each sector.

“We have decentralised teams in every geography and every region in South Africa that services our clients,” he explained.

In the piloting stages of the Opportunity Network programme, the bank introduced around 250 of its clients to the programme to experience the value-added service through the skills and expertise that Nedbank offers, where it offered a deeper understanding of the client’s strategic growth aspirations.

The bank reported almost all of these reported a success rate, finding some sort of match for their desired business opportunity.