RBS caps lending fees

The Royal Bank of Scotland has created a charter for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which it says will bring help to around 20 000 start-ups annually amid claims that banks aren't doing enough to help businesses, says Herald Scotland.

The bank plans to demonstrate its commitment to the key SME market by being the first to offer a cap on fees for arranging overdrafts and loans. Firms with a turnover of up to £25 million (R306 million) won't have to pay more than 1.5% of the value of any relevant borrowing facility annually.

It further plans to demonstrate its commitment to SMEs by including the offer of free transactional banking for start-ups for two years, during which they will not have to pay for services like cheque processing.

XHead = HP opens SME store

HP has opened a retail store catering to the needs of SMEs in Low Yat Plaza, Kuala Lumpur, reports TheStar online.

Country GM of HP's personal systems group, Danny Lee, says: “99.2% of all local companies are SMEs that constitute 35% of our current GDP”.

The HP Smart Office Solutions store is run by HP's authorised reseller Atoz and features professional laptops, printers, scanners and mini-servers.

Clifton Asset Management (CAM) reports that SME technology companies are anticipating another tough year ahead, despite believing that the worst of the recession is over, reports Computer Business Review.

According to the firm's quarterly survey of 1 000 SMEs in the IT industry, CAM found that 28% had cut jobs in the past six months, compared to 34% the previous quarter. Some10% fewer owner-managers say they would need to reduce payroll than in CAM's spring survey and almost one in four say their business had improved.

Even though these findings suggest that the peak of the recession is past, more than half the respondents believed the economy would flatline for at least another 12 months. “Most IT companies are still hurting from the recession. This is because most of them have a business model where they require people to make large capital investments in software and hardware,” says Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid, a cloud provider for SMEs.