geo/europe-and-central-asia
To expose the key trends and drivers behind how small to mid-sized enterprises manage working capital and access financing solutions. Treassury Management International and Misys undertook a survey of financing practices with 100 responses from small and mid-cap corporations with a turnover up to $1bn in the US, EMEA and APAC.
Lendix – a French marketplace lending platform for SMEs – has been authorised by the Spanish regulator, and will soon be launching an offshoot in Spain. Lendix closed a €13.5m Series B investment round in April, a round led by the French insurance firm CNP Assurances. The company indicated at the time that it intended to use the funds to expand into Spain and Italy.
Lendico, the online crowdlending marketplace which operates internationally, is moving into the corporate credit market in Switzerland. It is making this step in collaboration with the Swiss PostFinance, which will be a joint venture partner in Lendico Schweiz AG.
BNP Paribas Securities Services, Caisse des Dépôts, Euroclear, Euronext (Paris:ENX) (Amsterdam:ENX) (Brussels:ENX), S2iEM and Société Générale, in collaboration with Paris EUROPLACE, today announced that they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore together the development of a post-trade blockchain infrastructure for SMEs in Europe.
CrowdfundingHub teamed up with FG Laywers to launch a pan-European research to identify liability risk in respect to various forms of crowdfunding. The research is entitled Crowdfunding Cross Borders. CrowdfundingHub and FG Lawyers have enlisted the assistance of partners in 11 different European countries to aid in the collection of information across Europe.
According to the research team:
The alternative finance industry is a young industry and there is not a universally accepted taxonomy yet to describe the different actors in the industry. In The European Alternative Finance Benchmarking Report from Cambridge University (February 2015) this issue was already addressed. The Benchmarking Report followed the taxonomy of nine categories of business that had been constructed in defining and segmenting the UK alternative finance market in previous studies. We choose to follow this taxonomy as well and focus in our research on the four following types of crowdfunding:
This analysis provides an overview of the main markets relevant to EIF. It start by discussing the general market environment, then looks at the main aspects of equity finance and the guarantee & SME Securitisation markets. Finally, it briefly highlights important aspects of microfinance in Europe.
It is seven years since the global crisis and despite easy monetary policy, financial regulatory reform, and G20 resolutions favouring structural measures, the world economy is not making a lot of progress. Indeed, the responses to the crisis seem mainly to have stopped the banks from failing and then pushed the many faces of the crisis around between regions—currently taking the form of excess capacity in emerging markets. Productivity growth raises income per head, allows companies to pay better wages and it raises demand to help to eliminate excess capacity and improve employment.
Business angels’ investments increase 8,3% from 2013 to 2015
The 2015 edition of EBAN’s research reveals market growth in all early stage investment areas with particular highlight to angel investment activity which grew both in amounts invested as well as the number of active European Business Angel investors. Amongst the most relevant findings of the data collection, we emphasise the continuing trend of co-investment and remarkable growth of early-stage funds.
This paper highlights potential areas of opportunity - and risks - for marketplace lending growth and how to convert these guideposts into tactical next steps to enhance your company's operations.
Today’s “marketplace lending” looks very different from “peer-to-peer” lending a decade ago; and the rate of change continues to accelerate. What was once little more than a great idea for a matchmaking service focused on individual borrowers and retail investors has transformed into a broad range of financing activities that cross asset classes and investor types.
