Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Access to Finance for SMEs: Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and AIB

3:20 pm

Ms Ellvena Graham:

I will comment on young farmers. We tailored an offering to new entrants to the farming sector last year. We ran several educational seminars with Macra na Feirme to try to work with younger farmers.
The question of what we do with young entrepreneurs was raised. We do a good deal of work through Small Business Can, an online offering. A total of 20,000 people or businesses are registered and use the website now. A raft of information is available on the website and many of the people who use smallbusinesscan.comare entrepreneurs. We run many workshops through an offshoot, the Businesswomen Can programme, which is tailored directly to women entrepreneurs. We have ambassadors for that in the bank and outside the bank. We have several online offerings and seminars and a good deal of material is available through the smallbusinesscan.comwebsite. It is all aimed at young entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in general.
A question was asked about accreditation. The bank is accredited by the Chartered Banker Institute in the United Kingdom. That covers most of the questions.