Small Business Lending Innovation

Sharing ideas on digital transformation, loan automation, reducing credit risk and growing small business customer relationships.

Mantvydas Štareika CEO at CapitalBox

Why the SME lending gap needs alt finance to embrace collateralized lending

Despite making up 99 percent of European companies and the backbone of its economy, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remain underfunded in the billions of euros. Recent research estimates the gap is about 400 billion euro in the E.U. alone. These businesses are overwhelmingly underbanked, and it’s keeping them from growing. This situatio...

26 September 2023 /wholesale /startups

Amey Prabhu Senior Director at Virtusa

Digital Data - An enabler for Digital SME Lending

The buzz around SME or MSME Lending has been around for quite some time. For the uninitiated, MSME is Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises. To give you a perspective, Government of India defines enterprises with revenue not exceeding Rs.5cr as micro, those between Rs.5cr to Rs75cr as small and Rs 75cr to 250cr as medium sized businesses. Major co...

10 February 2023 /wholesale /inclusion

Mindaugas Mikalajūnas CEO at smeGo

It isn’t AI that’s biassed — it’s banks and VCs

AI has been getting a bad rap when it comes to possible bias. Amazon’s AI recruiting engine, ironically developed to eliminate possible human prejudice, appeared to be biassed against women. It downgraded resumés that contained words like “women” and the graduates of two all-women colleges. Google Photos’ algorithm apparently showed bias against ...

05 July 2022 /payments /inclusion

Ivan Zhiznevskiy Founder & CEO at 3S Money

Fintechs don’t have to rely on VCs to raise money…

There’s a long-standing belief among Fintech founders that you need VC (Venture Capitalist) investment when starting out to make the biggest splash. But this just isn’t the case. I know this from first-hand experience. “It’ll never take off,” is what I was told bluntly by one VC as he tucked into lobster linguine in a central-London restaurant. N...

25 April 2022 /inclusion /markets

Ron Benegbi Founder & CEO at Uplinq Financial Technologies

Lessons From a Founder

One of the most exciting events in an entrepreneur’s journey towards building a successful business is the very first one that occurs. That moment – sitting in a downtown coffee shop, standing at a bus stop, reading the Sunday paper when, out of nowhere, it hits… “I have an idea”. Ideas are seeds that materialize in the mind, and they tend to form...

06 December 2021 /people /identity

Thomas Pintelon Head of Strategy at Capilever

Some new techniques to unlock asset-based lending for company financing

Most SMEs have significant cash tied up in assets, for example inventory, machines, equipment, real estate or financial assets. Using these assets in an easy and flexible way for lending could unlock huge liquidity amounts and alternative sources of company funding. In this blog, we discuss some new techniques to make the qualification of the unde...

22 November 2021

Retired Member 

Acquiring and growing small business customer relationships - And where they go if you don't

The small-medium business (SMB) lending space is hard. For most credit unions, regional and community banks, small business lending represents high risk for low margins, even though it is in their DNA to grow their communities. No two small businesses are the same – all have different data variables such as operational models, firmagraphics, busin...

08 April 2021 /wholesale /covid-19