SMEs challenged to leverage on technology for cross border trade

Small and medium sized enterprises have been challenged to tap into cross border trade by seizing AfCFTA Opportunities through digital platforms, bank partnerships, and smart financing.

Further, small traders have been called upon to overcome knowledge gaps, high payment costs, and financing hurdles to unlock intra-African trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Despite policy ratification, intra-African trade remains below 15 per cent, hampered by critical barriers that banks and digital tools can now dismantle.

Mary Mulili, UBA Bank Kenya Managing Director, pinpointed lack of market intelligence as the primary bottleneck for small and medium sized enterprises.

“Products rot in Kenyan markets while identical goods are imported from outside Africa,” she noted.

Speaking during ‘My Chat with a Bank CEO’ forum, Ms Mulili said the solution lies in platforms like AfriExim’s Africa Trade Gateway (ATG), where verified SMEs can instantly view real-time demand, product, quantity, and buyer across the continent.

She said UBA’s 20-country footprint and active trade desks further expose Kenyan exporters to vetted opportunities.

Prohibitive cross border payment has been identified as an issue holding back cross border trade.

“Funds move across borders in local currencies and dollars, and back, eroding margins,” Mulili said.

UBA counters this via the Pan-African payment and settlement system (PAPSS) and internal B2B platforms, enabling local-currency billing and receipt with losses below 1 per cent.

“It might look minimal, but again, if you accumulate it for an SME, in the larger scale of it would be a big quarter,” Mulili said.

Currently, it costs so much to make cross border transactions, as value is lost in the chain of currency conversions.

One of their biggest Challenges that small traders face is getting financial support from financial institutions whenever they want to expand.

Mulili however notes that Kenyan banks have done a lot of work in prioritizing lending to the SME industry.

She says banks are coming up with interventions, innovations with credit risk insurance entities, guarantee fund entities to derisk lending to small traders to a certain limit.

“Security is one of the challenges that they face. Some of them are not organized,” Mulili said.

Kenyan banks have disbursed unsecured loans averaging Sh6.5 million and Sh7.75 million (USD50,000 to USD60,000), and a Sh19.4 million (USD150,000) partial guarantee by the banks.

Small businesses seeking cross border opportunities have been challenged to validate capacity, partner with banks to leverage trade desks as guarantors between unknown buyers and sellers.

Also, to Master cost-based pricing; factor production, logistics, insurance, and finance costs.

The importance of   mitigating forex risks was highlighted,

“If you want to get ahead in terms of your business, it is important to ensure that you invest in research. We have all this information available digitally,” Mulili said.

“In a country like Kenya where the mobile penetration is over 100 per cent, it means that your phone is a wealth of information and you can actually get a lot of this information,” She said.

The My Chat with a Bank CEO series provides an interactive platform where bank leaders engage directly with customers on key banking topics.

The October–November 2025 edition features six CEOs discussing how the industry is leveraging the KESONIA framework to empower businesses and households across Kenya.

Visit My Chat with a Bank CEO for registration.