BUSINESS ACADEMIES

BPB, in cooperation with its strategic partner European Fund For Southeast Europe (EFSE), has started providing non-financial services or support services to small businesses in Kosovo.These non-financial services, the so-called Academies of Entrepreneurship / Business, offer various trainings that will enable businesses to develop their strategic plans, marketing plans and financial management and ensure growth and continuation of businesses. These academies will be organized in the 7 largest cities of Kosovo, where participants will be about 300 businesses and will last throughout the year. The trainings in this academy will be held by the company GURU Academy from Turkey, a company with many years of experience in the field of business consulting.

Mr. Arton Celina, Chief Executive Officer of BPB, with regards to this project, stated: “BPB, with over 99 million EUR portfolio and 11000 active clients in the MNVM segment and, is a bank that aims to be a strategic partner to small and medium businesses. Apart from providing financial services, BPB is constantly researching and talking to our clients about problem solving and the contribution that we can make. As a result of these researches and conversations with clients, we have decided to organize these business academies, which we have seen as a very important request of businesses for their further development.

In Kosovo, 7000-8000 enterprises are registered every year, where the majority are micro enterprises, which employ 1-9 people and from the data of these researches, we have concluded that many these businesses have a lifespan of 5 years. During this period they may change activities due to market circumstances, or even disappear due to weak capacity to compete in the market. The problems identified that have shown this conclusion are strategic miss-positioning, being small and unstable, lack of knowledge to deal with various business challenges and improper governance.

Thus, in addition to financing, BPB has started another, innovative approach to help these businesses towards their development, because we believe that if these topics are addressed with a competent consultant with the right experience and knowledge, they can help these businesses a lot. In this regard, to address these issues, we thought that the organization of workshops or seminars which we have called the Business Academy are appropriate for our clients. Participation in these academies will be free of charge for our clients.

During these Academies, clients benefit from services such as:

– Training and consulting by external consulting companies and banking experts in the country

– Seminars on business planning skills and development and financial management strategies

– Articles on MNVMs, internet platforms, magazines, media materials

– Seminars / meetings, exchanges of experiences