Merchant Finance chief executive Veilawa Rereiwasaliwa says entrenched organisational culture is the biggest obstacle to the company’s drive to innovate, and that tackling that culture has been central to recent efforts to improve products and inclusion. Speaking at a Leadership Fiji event on Tuesday at Greenhouse Co‑working in Suva, Rereiwasaliwa also disclosed that a women‑focused lending initiative initially missed its mark before corrective steps doubled the number of women‑owned businesses benefiting from it.
“The biggest threat to all of this and one of the biggest threats to innovative leadership is culture,” Rereiwasaliwa told the Leadership Fiji audience, stressing that changing practices required deliberate structural adjustments and new people. “I couldn’t do this alone. So, I brought in people from the market, starting from the leadership team all the way to the entry‑level side.”
Rereiwasaliwa said resistance within organisations frequently slows change, noting bluntly: “It’s the people that say, ‘no, we’re not going to do that’.” He argued that recruiting external talent across levels was necessary to break habits and to reconfigure how the company approaches product design, risk appetite and customer targeting.
The CEO used the women‑focused financing product as a concrete example of how cultural and operational shortcomings can undercut good intentions. He acknowledged that in the “first couple of months” the initiative was inadvertently providing finance to male‑owned businesses, a misalignment that exposed weaknesses in client targeting and internal processes. Management then moved to refine procedures and oversight to ensure the scheme reached its intended beneficiaries, actions Rereiwasaliwa said led to a doubling of the number of women‑owned enterprises receiving finance.
While he did not provide absolute figures for the scheme’s reach, the turnaround underscores the difference between launching an initiative and embedding the systems and staff behaviours needed to sustain it. Rereiwasaliwa attributed the early shortfall to implementation gaps rather than to the design of the product itself, and presented the corrective measures — changes to structure, recruitment and presumably lending criteria and monitoring — as proof that course corrections can yield rapid results.
The remarks come as Merchant Finance seeks to reposition itself in a competitive credit market and to respond to expectations that financial institutions play a role in broadening access for underserved groups. Rereiwasaliwa’s comments at Greenhouse Co‑working mark the latest development in the company’s publicly stated push to transform its operations through talent refreshment and targeted initiatives.
By highlighting both the internal resistance to change and the tangible gains from corrective action, Rereiwasaliwa aimed to offer a pragmatic lesson for other institutions attempting to combine innovation with social objectives. His message: designing inclusive products is only half the battle — organisational culture and the people who implement policy are often the deciding factors in whether those products reach the intended beneficiaries.
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