Scaling-Up SME Access to Financial Services

Abstract

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a major role in economic development, particularly in emerging countries, but access to finance remains a key constraint to SME. In the light of the new understanding of the SME finance challenges that this report synthesizes, the Financial Inclusion Experts Group (FIEG) makes key recommendations for the G-20 leaders, in order to achieve a global scale-up of SME access to financial services in the developing world. The G-20 FIEG SME Finance Sub-Group executed a global SME Finance stocktaking exercise with various SME finance models to establish best practices in SME Finance.The report concludes that, given the fragmented SME finance data space, the G-20 has a unique opportunity to lead the collaborative effort on improving the availability and quality of SME finance data globally. This can be achieved through encouraging and coordinating the data collection efforts at regional, national, and global levels conducted by a multitude of sources including national governments/agencies and international organizations and effectively addressing the data collection challenges along the way to ensure continuity of these efforts moving forward.