A suc­cess. That's how Cari­Cris, the Caribbean's re­gion­al cred­it rat­ing agency deemed a pi­lot project to pre­pare small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es (SMEs) to be­come in­vest­ment-ready for com­mer­cial and al­ter­na­tive fi­nanc­ing.

In 2009, the In­ter­Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank through the Mul­ti­lat­er­al In­vest­ment Fund, in­vest­ed US$300,000 in Cari­Cris.

Speak­ing Tues­day, Wayne Dass, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer said the project gained rapid ac­cep­tance in the T&T mar­ket.

"We launched the mod­el last year, 2011 in a pi­lot project with the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T as well as the IDB pro­vid­ed the fund­ing. We did a pi­lot project of 25 SMEs from many in­dus­tries man­u­fac­tur­ing, en­ter­tain­ment, re­tail and so," Dass said.

He was out­lin­ing the suc­cess of the project at the First Caribbean Com­pet­i­tive­ness Fo­rum which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Dock Road, Port-of-Spain.

The size of the firms that were part of the project had av­er­age "an­nu­al sales with­in the range of TT$11.6 mil­lion, to­tal as­sets were over $10.4 mil­lion and num­ber of full time em­ploy­ees were 44," Dass said.

He added that there were a num­ber of suc­cess sto­ries com­ing out of the rat­ings which were giv­en to the SMEs.

"These firms were ac­tu­al­ly able to use the rat­ings to re­new ex­ist­ing cred­it line with their bank. Cou­ple com­pa­nies were ac­tu­al­ly able to go to dif­fer­ent banks and ac­cess new loans from the bank with their cred­it rat­ing re­port."

With a good rat­ing the par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny was able to ne­go­ti­ate a re­duc­tion in their in­ter­est rates by one per cent.

The rat­ing al­so as­sists the banks to "tie in­ter­est rates to the ac­tu­al cred­it rat­ings. It is mov­ing the banks to risk-based pric­ing of loans so, they don't charge a 'one size fits all kind of rate' to all the SMEs, rather iden­ti­fy there are strong SMEs who de­serve to get a low­er in­ter­est rate," he said.