Economist & Finanza buona

Riporto con piacere l’articolo pubblicato oggi dall’ Economist che parla del private equity e del venture capital private quali strumenti di "finanza buona" a supporto delle PMI, attivi in UK da diversi anni. In questo senso, il mio intervento  pubblicato alcuni giorni fa “ Private equity e sistema PMI “ con il quale suggerivo ed auspicavo di prendere esempio.

On the side of the angels

New ways of lending to small businesses

If There is  one bit of finance where people agree on the need for more innovation, it is in lending to small business. Policymakers are desperate to get more credit flowing to this vital engine of economic growth. Banks claim that lending is muted because demand is subdued, but that is not the only problem. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are harder credit risks to assess than large ones, so they attract higher capital charges and are often the first to lose their funding in a downturn.

A host of new firms have sprung up with solutions. Some are seeking to fill the gap left by the banks, rather than overhaul the way that lending is done. Shawbrook is a new, specialised lender to small firms in Britain, where the dominance of a handful of big banks makes the choice for SMEs particularly limited. Owen Woodley, Shawbrook’s boss, says that it can get its credit analysis done faster than the established institutions.

Other firms are trying to reinvent small-business financing by providing virtual marketplaces where investors and SMEs can come together. In the world of equity capital the pacesetter is a British firm called Crowdcube, which uses the idea of “crowdfunding” to enable lots of investors to buy up small stakes in start-up firms.

The same peer-to-peer model lies behind Funding Circle, another British start-up which launched in 2010 to facilitate lending to small businesses for periods of one to three years. Businesses go through an underwriting process before they get on to the company’s website, where lenders, predominantly individuals, can bid on the rate at which they are prepared to lend. The average loan is £40,000 ($63,000), the rates are competitive and firms get hold of the money within about two weeks. Samir Desai, a co-founder, dismisses the argument that lending to small firms requires bankers to make personal credit assessments: “SMEs want low costs, a quick process and a transparent fee structure, not a relationship.” Lenders are encouraged to spread their risk among at least 20 borrowers.

There is another way of speeding up the underwriting process: taking a bet not on an SME itself but on its debtors. The Receivables Exchange, launched in New Orleans in 2007, enables investors to buy up invoices, or fractions of them, owed to small businesses. The idea is similar to factoring, whereby firms sell off all their invoices at a discount to improve their cashflow. But the idea behind The Receivables Exchange—and MarketInvoice, a British equivalent—is to break receivables down into small, tradable units so that buyers can make judgments on individual debtors and diversify their holdings. “We provide electron-level transparency,” says Nic Perkin, a co-founder of The Receivables Exchange. Transactions are somewhat less minuscule, approaching a rate of $1 billion a year.