Europe and Central Asia

Citigroup has quietly launched a website to make small business loans of up to $1 million, the latest effort by a big bank to make the process of smaller loans more technology-friendly.

Citigroup's online toe in the water comes after similar moves by several other banks. For example, JPMorgan Chase & Co announced a partnership with online lender On Deck Capital Inc in December 2015 and Wells Fargo & Co launched a fast-decision online small business loan product some eight months ago.

Top financial institutions around the globe are going in on blockchain in a big way, with massive investments in R&D and beyond. Larger corporations are exploring distributed ledger, too.

Now, seven major banks in Europe are looking to pull SMEs into the blockchain exploration.

This paper analyses the performance trends of investees after receiving EIF support. The aim is to establish a taxonomy of start-ups according to their growth trends. Using a wide range of descriptive statistics, the first part of the work documents the remarkable growth of EIF-backed start-ups, both on average and median terms. The second part of the work carries a cluster analysis that combines different measures of firm medium-term development.

KPMG, along with AltFi data, has published a new report on alternative lending in Europe. KPMG also sourced data from the most recent Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance report. The document, entitled Alternative Lending Market Trends in Continental Europe 2016, provides an interesting snapshot of online lending beyond the UK.

Jevgenijs Kazanins, CEO of Twino, commented on the report; 

A rapidly changing payments industry is threatening incumbent banks’ payment revenues and customer relationships with significant knock-on impacts to a banks’ ability to retain customers and cross sell. Against this backdrop, Accenture research shows that up to 43% of retail banking payments revenue in the United Kingdom is at risk between 2015 and 2020.

Microfinance conferences have offered a unique experience in recent years. In the world outside the events, the industry has been wracked by extraordinary upheaval. It has lurched from development sector darling to punching bag, as client over-indebtedness grabbed headlines, research cast doubt upon its anti-poverty impact, and skeptics gleefully used these events to call the entire industry into question.

Access to finance is the least pressing problem in general and businesses' demands for financing were often fulfilled. However, financing might still be a barrier for smaller and younger companies or in specific countries.

Bank loans and credit lines remain the most relevant sources of financing for SMEs in the EU. 55% of SMEs used credit lines in the past or considered using them in the future, while 50% said that about bank loans and 47% about leasing. Equity financing is relevant for 13% of SMEs.

The Commission's Start-up and Scale-up Initiative aims to give Europe's many innovative entrepreneurs every opportunity to become world leading companies. It pulls together all the possibilities that the EU already offers and adds a new focus on venture capital investment,insolvency law and taxation

Small businesses from the EU are increasingly confident about their access to finance, according to a joint survey published today by the European Commission and the European Central Bank.

On the basis of the recent capital increase of the Investment Fund (EIF), the EIB Group has envisaged to increase lending to SMEs while broadening the range of intermediaries through which it operates, including new financial and non-conventional intermediaries such as smaller regional banks and more specialist financing institutions such as SMEfocussed leasing entities, which have a particular focus on smaller SMEs and start-ups.