Tag: Financial Inclusion
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The Low-Down on SMB Lending
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released research suggesting that SMB lending had more than one thing affecting it. A supply and demand problem. Policy Analyst Anne Marie Wiersh and Professor Scott Shane summed it up in the following paragraph: “Since the Great Recession, bank lending to small businesses has fallen significantly,…
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When You Should Order Invoice Finance on the Funding Menu–Part 2
In part 1 of this two-part post, I talked about the use of invoice finance as a cost effective way for business to fund its credit sales. While invoice finance tends to have ‘sweet spot’ sectors (manufacturing, services) and hard to do areas (construction, hospitality, consulting), the basic suitability is simple: we’ve seen deals go…
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Why e-Invoicing Helps Late Payment to Smaller Suppliers More Than Regulation
This week, the European Directive 2011/7/EU on Combating Late Payment in Commercial Transactions comes into force. To summarise, it’s looking to cap payment terms at 60 days unless agreed otherwise, ‘provided such extension is not grossly unfair’ to the supplier. It also sets a maximum period of acceptance/verification to 30 days unless agreed otherwise and…
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Connecting To Cash: Keys To Unlock Working Capital
Life as an entrepreneur trying to reshape commercial lending is far from boring. Trying to understand what will make commercial lenders finance a business. Figuring out why a business waits until they have a critical cash need before acting. Or for that matter, what about their previous lending experience discouraged the businesses from talking to…
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Turning e-Invoicing Into A Key To Liquidity
Policy makers recognise that any means to inject liquidity into the Small and Mid-Size Business (SMB) sector needs to be pursued. The BIS task force in the UK identified Supply Chain Finance (SCF) or Reverse Factoring as one of the ways to increase cash flow availability to SMB supplier base. Unfortunately, credit capacity is a…
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Initial Reaction: The BIS Task Force Report
For those who have not already read it, the report released by the BIS Task Force will make interesting reading. Some of the figures quoted in there are scary: 9% of SMBs sought financing in 2011; 1/3 of SMBs applying were unsuccessful in their loan application; a projected 5 year funding gap of £44 billion…
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Is Lending To SMBs That Much Harder?
So the finger pointing continues. Policy makers are still unhappy with bank lending to SMBs. Lobby groups are not dancing in the aisles about this either and everyone has some ideas on how to tap additional sources. Lending to businesses, SMBs in particular has been decreasing, despite the need for it to grow instead. I’ve…
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Transforming Lending in the UK Part 3
This is the third in a series of posts centred around the article ‘How should we fund the UK’s growth agenda?’ posted earlier this month. In the article, the head of the Business Finance Task Force asked for ideas on ways to transform lending and fund UK growth. I extracted key questions (in quotations) from…