Marcus James still has vivid recollection of one particular afternoon in the summer of 2002. He was about to hit the road for a long overdue client visit so he reached into the filing cabinet in his office, retrieved a binder and made sure it was added to the documents already tucked away in his leather briefcase.

As he headed out the door and towards his car he contemplated the many hours he had already been on the job and the long journey ahead. Among his scheduled stops was Aboukir, a small village nestled in the hills of St Ann.

The founder of Access Financial Services Ltd was on a debt collection mission and one of the customers he anxiously sought lived and operated a grocery store in the sleepy community.

The man had fallen behind in his loan payments and was for several weeks incommunicado, so the young businessman set off on his journey, fully aware that this could be a fool’s errand.

The narrow, winding road eventually led to a nondescript building. James parked his vehicle, made a couple purposeful strides and in short order was on the inside.

There he was, the missing client, reclined in an armchair taking an evening nap his legs crossed, his feet hoisted on the countertop.

The shopkeeper, sensing human presence in his establishment, instinctively sprang to his feet and tried his best to appear lucid.

“He could not believe when he saw me, that I could find him,” says James. “The expression on his face was as if he had seen a ghost.”

It took the man a few seconds to gain enough composure to sustain dialogue, and once the initial shock had passed the conversation inevitably turned to the obvious business at hand.

Even before he was presented with a specific payment demand the storeowner began reaching towards a top shelf — extending his entire body and stretching one arm until his fingers made contact with an item that was kept hidden and out of easy reach.

The mini drama that followed was reminiscent of a cowboy flick recapturing slices of antebellum America: the shopkeeper gingerly brought down the aluminium container as James remained in complete suspense and fixated on his every move. He gently placed the pan full to the brim with coins of all denominations on the countertop as if he had rehearsed the scene a thousand times.

“This is all I have for now, Mr James,” he remarked as he handed over his treasure trove to the debt collector. “This is to help make up the payment.”

This event remains a mere blip in the 14-year history of Access Financial Services. James went on to achieve some really consequential things, not the least of which was his seminal role in shaping micro lending into an organised, well-funded and respected industry within Jamaica.

Yet the experience in the deep rural village was not without its impact, for the moment was at once heart-warming and a poignant reminder of the challenges that lay ahead.

The lesson was stark: the budding entrepreneur, against all odds, was attempting to build an enterprise with a client list that largely fit the profile of the Abuka shopkeeper. To succeed, it was going to take a combination of superhuman effort, strict internal controls, and the good character of borrowing customers.

“I realised that if the business was going to work, we had to build it customer by customer,” says James as he reflects on the early days. “We had to know each customer intimately. We had to work seven days per week from early morning to late at night.”

The early history of Access is replete with stories similar to the experience in Abuka, though certainly not with the same dramatic content or necessarily its happy ending — the grocery owner having eventually paid off his loan.

But given the current profile of this company — its revenue stream, profit, the size of its customer base and workforce, the scale of its retail network — it is a reasonable inference that over the years, James and his staff have made many more good calls than bad ones.

Access employs 138 members of staff spread across 16 branches throughout Jamaica in all parishes except Hanover, St Mary, and St Thomas.

The workforce, including the 80 individuals who are located at the 16,000 square foot headquarters and main branch on Half-Way-Tree Road in Kingston, serve over 18,000 clients. They manage a (current) loan portfolio of nearly $2 billion, and in the nine months to September 2014 advanced $1.5 billion in credit to customers.

Sixty per cent of those who seek funding from this organisation use the money for personal purposes; they each can get up to $1.5 million and two years to repay. Business loans have a limit of $500,000.

For the financial year to December 31, 2013, this financial institution disbursed $1.9 billion in loans and posted net profit of $270 million, up from $238 million the previous year. Total revenue amounted to $817 million.

Access is one of the lead organisations within an industry that was nurtured into existence a decade-and-a-half ago to fill needs and serve a market segment that traditional banks once considered too fragmented and risky. The players in the sector typically make short-term loans to meet customers’ personal and micro-business requirements; they accept fungible collateral but are constantly fending off charges levelled by critics that their lending rates are extortionate.

James defends the rates, arguing that the industry’s average annualised interest charges of 40-50 per cent are within the ballpark of what credit card customers at commercial banks pay, and that in any case these costs reflect the high risks that micro-lending companies like his, face.

Last year, his company booked $95 million in charges against revenue for doubtful debt.

Nevertheless, the prodigious lending rates combined with the relative success that this firm has had in containing bad loans help to explain why it could have produced net returns of 33 per cent on total revenue of $817 million last year — an enviable performance by the standards of the financial sector.

As an aspiring businessman a decade-and-a-half ago, James already had under his belt several years in corporate banking and a university education in finance and accounts. When he first cast his eyes on the profoundly underserved micro-lending market and began crunching the numbers that this industry could potentially churn out, he readily concluded that this had to be his route to entrepreneurism.

His formal education aside, the young man came to the table with one formidable advantage: he had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs — his mother Nancy having built and operated a pastry business and retail outlet called Cookie Jar, on Half-Way-Tree Road, and his father Neville being one of the founders of the now defunct Corporate Group; and KLAS FM radio station which he also managed.

The challenge that James faced was not having a forerunner within the industry or any form of template on which he could pattern his company. What existed at the time was at best an unorganised network of informal lenders that generally operated below the radar of officialdom.

So it took an uncanny display of long-term visioning for this investor to have seen with such clarity the untapped potential that micro-lending represented and for him to set out to create a firm that had the operational structure and public appeal to make it a strong candidate for a seat at the exchange.

“I knew I wanted to own a big business,” he says. “I saw my father’s companies listed on the stock market and wanted to develop a company that I could list.”

In September 2000, James moved into a 200-square-foot office at 41B Half-Way-Tree Road — inside the building his parents owned and where his mother operated her bakery and retail outlet. He had $10,000 in savings.

Terry-Ann Bisnaught, who is now a credit officer at Access, became its first and now longest-serving employee, having been the receptionist the day the firm opened for business.

Like the far-sighted businessman, the Jamaican and Dutch governments had seen the economic potential waiting to be unlocked by micro-lending, so they created a fund to pump prime the industry. The money was managed by the business consulting outfit Development Options.

Access immediately tapped into this revolving line of credit, as did the 14 other micro-lending institutions on which the Government pinned its hope for employment generation through the scores of small businesses they would help bring to life.

“I did the business plan and used my accounting background to set up the business properly from day one,” says James in explaining how he was able to secure the loan, and why he had such confidence in his vision.

Yet the paperwork was the easy part.

The company had to be built from the ground up, and there was no getting around the tough, unforgiving time-and-motion task of constantly beating the pavements of downtown Kingston, and reaching into working-class neighbourhoods and inner-city communities in search of potential customers. The geographical reach soon extended to rural townships.

But the experience of other players in the nascent industry did not provide much encouragement.

“Most of the people who started off in the business failed,” James observes, “and most people I spoke with said that my business would fail because Jamaicans don’t like to pay back money.”

Even a close family friend, Senator Anthony Johnson, was understandably sceptical.

“Check me back in six months!” Johnson is reported to have quipped, in his usual folksy style.

James points to his parents and wife Julie as being “constant sources of moral support and encouragement” and insists that he himself never once doubted that the business would succeed.

“I had no real fear that the business could not work,” he declares. “I wanted a business of significant scale and the only challenge I saw was how to scale the operation. I knew I wanted a business that I could take public so I made sure to put in place the accounting systems, the audit system, a certain structure from the start. I knew I did not want a mom and pop business.”

Seated at his desk in his spacious office, James shared some of the gritty details of his experience with laying the early foundation for the success his company now enjoys.

* Daily trips to downtown Kingston to introduce the company and its services to potential borrowers: higglers, market vendors, small shop owners, just about anyone selling or making something of economic value.

* Regular visits to the homes of prospective customers to verify addresses and to create bills of sale for appliances being used for collateral.

* Constant site visits to assess the stability and longevity of the businesses for which loans would be advanced and to determine the capacity of the owners to repay the debt.

* Doing back-room work at the office after normal business hours — from loan processing to recording of bills of sale to ledger work.

* After loan disbursement the never-ending follow-up to ensure repayment;

* Constantly expanding the market even while generating repeat business from current clients.

“I had to work seven days per week, sometimes all the way back to one o’ clock in the mornings,” he says. “As the portfolio grew we began to add people to our staff.”

Still, his role as an invaluable factotum in his start-up was driven not only by the obvious need for him to generate sweat equity but his multiple abilities — someone uniquely cut out for the task. He had brought to his organisation experience in finance and marketing, credit risk assessment, loan documentation, accounting and had taught himself computer networking — all skills that were put to use during the early days at Access. On the job he quickly learned the techniques of hunting down delinquent customers, and was his company’s omnipresent marketing representative.

“I remember when we set up the Montego Bay office,” says James in citing one example of just how frenetic those early days were. “I left Kingston at six o’clock in the evening for MoBay, set up the branch, including the computer network, and drove back to Kingston the same night.”

Once the Montego Bay office was up and running in August of 2001, other parishes quickly followed. Indeed, having a presence in the island’s main towns was the logical way to grow the business.

But the most fruitful period came on the heels of the decision in 2004 to expand the Access loan facilities to individuals who were seeking money for personal use.

“Initially we were offering only business loans, but then we realised that there was a demand for personal funds, especially for back-to-school and Christmas,” James explains. “We got into the personal market from internally generated funds in 2004. It allowed us to scale the business faster, especially by getting into companies with a large number of employees.”

Suddenly Access was the most talked about name among lower and mid-level employees at many large corporations — at least those where workers could organise payroll deductions so as to be able to gain access to quick loans from the new company.

Within a year of this game-changing move, James felt he now had an operation that was ready to be taken to a new level. He began talking to investors — institutions that had the infrastructure to create synergies with Access.

ICWI was the first on the list.

“I thought they had the network and assets that could expand the business,” he says.

Those discussions did not bear fruit, but they set an inexorable train in motion and the next stop was at Mayberry Investments Limited. The brokerage house was invited to take a look at the micro-finance company and within short order the announcement was made that it had acquired 49 per cent stake in Access for $39 million.

With this deal, the brokerage positioned itself as the clear choice to take Access public when the time was right.

Given his long-declared ambition, it should come as no surprise that James was the first entrepreneur to line up behind the programme that the Government introduced in 2009 to encourage new stock market listing. The Junior Stock Exchange was created as the vehicle to give practical effect to this initiative.

So when the Access share offer opened on October 9, 2009, the company’s founder and principal shareholder was fulfilling many dreams.

If fully subscribed, the offer would raise $100 million, most of which would go straight into augmenting the funds that were available for the firm’s revolving loan schemes. But the real sweetener was that for the first five years as a publicly traded firm, Access would pay no tax whatsoever on its profit, and for another five years, tax would only be charged on half of its gross income.

In the five years since the programme has been in place, 23 companies have followed James’ leadership to accept seats on the Junior Stock Exchange.

In 2013, Access raised an additional $103.5 million through the issue of a nine per cent bond — one of two listed companies to have raised additional funding subsequent to listing on the Junior Stock Exchange.

— END