DBS, NTU launch program to help SMEs expand to APAC

About 30 SMEs are expected to participate in the first run of the ELT.

DBS Bank and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) will be offering a national program that aims to help the country’s leading small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) expand their business overseas, particularly in the Asia-Pacific Region.

In partnership with Enterprise Singapore, the one-year program called Enterprise Leadership for Transformation (ELT) will be offered in October 2021 and will be joined in by approximately 30 SMEs.

Under ELT, participants will receive lectures and workshops from NTU faculty and instructors, and senior leaders from DBS on internationalisation and innovation.

The program also “offers valuable opportunities for enterprise leaders to tap into strong local and global entrepreneurship and innovation networks to achieve greater success in their businesses,” according to Professor Lam Kwok Yan, director of Nanyang Technopreneurship Center at NTU.

For her part, Joyce Tee, group head of SME Banking at DBS, said their collaboration with NTU will “create a supportive ecosystem that enables SMEs to capitalize on the twin trends of internationalisation and innovation and propel them to the next stage of growth.”

“We know that our SMEs have what it takes to do well internationally, so our aim is to avail different avenues to support SMEs’ aspirations to spread their wings overseas. SMEs are critical to Singapore’s economic vitality, and we firmly believe that when SMEs do well, Singapore will do well,” Tee added.

DBS and NTU are also eyeing to conduct overseas immersion programmes to plug SMEs into the broader regional business ecosystems, with a focus on four business corridors, but not limited to, Singapore-Hong Kong; Singapore-China; Singapore-India; and China-Hong Kong.