Davos 2024: India’s digitisation, financial inclusion efforts benefiting SMEs, says Ling Hai of Mastercard

Ling Hai, President, International Markets at Mastercard

Ling Hai, President, International Markets at Mastercard, is optimistic about India’s growth story on the back of its growing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector as government doubles down efforts on digitisation and financial inclusion.

“You need to make sure rising tides raise all boats. India’s digitization and financial inclusion efforts are meant to address this issue of haves and haves not, and an important aspect of this is the SMEs,” he said while speaking with Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum, Davos.

“There is a lot of optimism about India. If you look at the fundamentals like demographics, easing inflation, spending power, export, service sector, a lot of things are going strong for India. There is confidence among people, which is driving the growth,” Hai further said.

He also spoke about Mastercard’s work in the same direction with investments channelised to address the growing SMEs in India.

In August 2023, the global card giant launched a programme 'Strive India' to provide digital tools and education to SMEs to enable them to run businesses efficiently.

This included a $100m credit facility launched in partnership with HDFC Bank, DFC, and USAID, and a commitment of Rs 250 crores ($ 33 million) to support small businesses in India.

The programme is in line with Mastercard’s larger goal of bringing 1 billion people into the formal credit system by 2025. “In addition to this number is also 50 million SMEs and 25 million women-owned businesses,” Hai said.