SME lender Grid Finance’s CEO Derek F. Butler, shares how the company is expanding its offering to include a digital pension product targeted at the owners of small businesses. Grid will act as distributor and has engaged Conexim to provide the back office infrastructure on the product.
Babson College is a founding institution and lead sponsor of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). GEM is a global consortium that conducts research on 66 world economies. GEM brings together over 400 researchers from across the globe and includes more than 100 institutions every year. The first report was published in 1999.
Capital One, a major U.S. bank has partnered with Xero’s cloud accounting platform. The deal to allow Capital One’s credit card feed was signed in May, and went live last week.
Fintech and Financial Services: Initial Considerations; SDN/17/05; June 19, 2017
SME Finance Forum member, BNP Paribas along with others, has launched Liquidshare, a venture aimed at exploring distributed ledger technology and its potential to disrupt small business lending. CASEIS, Caisse des Depots, Euroclear, Euronext and S2iEM are also part of the initiative, while Paris Europlace is reportedly providing support.
The European Association for Guarantee Schemes (AECM), the World Bank and the SME Finance Forum are partnering to organize AECM 25th Anniversary Event. The Global Conference on Guarantee Institutions for SME Financing will take place in Madrid on June 01-02, under the High Patronage of His Majesty the King of Spain.
This high level conference will allow experience exchange and knowledge sharing on different types of schemes including securitization, equity, and agrifinance related, as well as the results of the PCG Principles survey.
Anti-money laundering/combating-the-financing-of-terrorism laws are grounded in reasonable national security concerns—preventing the cross-border flow of funds to terror or criminal groups. But these policies can have unintentional and costly consequences, in particular for people in poor countries. Those most affected are likely to include the families of migrant workers, small businesses that need to access working capital or trade finance, and recipients of life-saving aid in active-conflict, post-conflict or post-disaster situations.
This analysis provides an overview of the main markets relevant to EIF. We start by discussing the general market environment for SME finance, then look at the main aspects of equity finance and the SME guarantees / securitisation markets. Finally, we highlight important aspects of microfinance in Europe.
The EIF Working Papers are designed to make available to a wider readership selected topics and studies in relation to EIF´s business.
Following the introduction of stricter capital rules by the CRR and CRD IV, and in the context of credit tightening after the financial crisis, a capital reduction factor for loans to SMEs—the so-called SME SF—was introduced by the CRR to allow credit institutions to counterbalance the rise in capital requirements resulting from the CCB, and to provide an adequate flow of credit to this particular group of companies.
