SME finance

SME finance is the funding of small and medium-sized enterprises, and represents a major function of the general business finance market – in which capital for different types of firms are supplied, acquired, and costed or priced. Capital is supplied through the business finance market in the form of bank loans and overdrafts; leasing and hire-purchase arrangements; equity/corporate bond issues; venture capital or private equity; and asset-based finance such as factoring and invoice discounting.

However, not all business finance is external/commercially supplied through the market. Much finance is internally generated by businesses out of their own earnings and/or supplied informally as trade credit, that is, delays in paying for purchases of goods and services.

The economic and banking importance of the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector is well recognized in academic and policy literature. It is also acknowledged that these actors in the economy may be under-served, especially in terms of finance. This has led to significant debate on the best methods to serve this sector.

Although there have been numerous schemes and programmes in different economic environments, there are a number of distinctive recurring approaches to SME finance.

A substantial portion of the SME sector may not have the security required for conventional collateral based bank lending, nor high enough returns to attract formal venture capitalists and other risk investors. In addition, markets may be characterized by deficient information (limiting the effectiveness of financial statement-based lending and credit scoring). This has led to claims of an "SME finance gap" or Nano gap – particularly in emerging economies. At a workshop hosted by The Network for Governance, Entrepreneurship & Development (GE&D) in Geneva in July 2008, SMEs that fall into this category have been defined as Small Growing Businesses (SGBs).

There have been at least two distinctive approaches to try to overcome the so-called SME finance gap.

The first has been to broaden the collateral based approach by encouraging bank lenders to finance SMEs with insufficient collateral. This might be done through an external party providing the collateral or guarantees required. Unfortunately, such schemes are counter to basic free market principles, and they tend to be unsustainable. This sector is increasingly called the Meso-finance sector.

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Wikipedia