With the Financial Advisory Team in imSME, unmatched or unsuccessful applicants will be further motivated to enhance their capacity and capability with relevant trainings aimed at improving their chances to secure financings or loans in the future. The imSME complements existing initiatives in the SME financing ecosystem, such as BNM’s Fund for SMEs, alternative financing channels such as equity crowdfunding and P2P lending, and the Small Debt Resolution Scheme. BNM’s Role to Encourage Financial Inclusion & SME Financing SMEs is a pertinent component of Malaysia’s economy. To reap their full potential, SMEs must be continuously nurtured, guided and developed to become more competitive. The financial services industry needs to play its role in continuously innovating, adapting to the digital disruption and be the frontier in driving the national SME agenda, by ensuring adequate access to financing. Technology has the potential to transform financial services. Most notably it dramatically reduces the costs of providing access to financial services, particularly in remote locations and to small borrowers; transforms credit decision-making ability by enabling lenders to tap into alternative data sources. This has made it possible for people without collateral or credit histories to borrow; and simplifies finance and enabling providers to significantly improve the quality of customer interactions. There is a need to advance new ways to deliver financial services to the underserved, beyond the provision of access points. In particular, the potential to effectively integrate the delivery of financial services with the day-to-day activities of underserved segments remains largely untapped.
My view has been that the further appreciation of the Swedish krona has risked leading to impaired target fulfilment, and this has been the motivation behind my stance in favour of a lower repo rate path than that decided upon. Am I not concerned that a lower repo rate path would lead to excessive inflation, considering how inflation has increased recently due to higher energy and commodity prices? It remains to be seen how permanent these increases will be. In our most recent forecast, which assumed the stabilisation of these prices, underlying inflation, even in the main scenario, was estimated at less than 2 per cent for most of the forecast period (see Figure 2). On the basis of this forecast, there is thus scope for a more expansionary monetary policy. One matter that I intend to address at the next monetary policy decision is the wide gap between CPI inflation and CPIF inflation that we saw in January and February. This gap is partly due to a detail, related to mortgage costs, in the calculation method used, which also results in higher CPI inflation over the rest of the year than was forecast in the monetary policy report in February. However, in my opinion, the underlying inflationary pressure in the economy is still low, which, for example, is reflected by the low outcome for CPIF inflation. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Monetary policy has to be forward-looking, as its influence on the economy is subject to a time-lag.