Accelerate Your SME Lending Strategy

with Provenir

SMEs are seen as the backbone of the economy – they make up 90% of businesses worldwide, and account for 50% of global employment. Supporting SMEs in their operations and encouraging their growth is critical. Despite this, they often have a hard time accessing credit. Traditional lending institutions find it difficult to accurately and quickly assess risk using legacy decisioning solutions, leaving SMEs scrambling to find the funding they need.

How can you accelerate your SME lending strategy? By using advanced technology solutions, like integrated data, automated decisioning, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

Research shows that 44% of SMEs look for funding simply to meet their operational expenses, while the other 56% look for credit to diversify and expand. Accessing credit quickly can mean the difference between a small business flourishing or floundering. Especially in times of economic uncertainty, powering fast approvals is critical. And not only does it directly help the SMEs grow, it also has a ripple effect – ensuring continued employment for that 50% of the world, and enabling investment in the economy (when people have jobs, they naturally spend more money).

Real-Time Credit Approvals

Increasingly, innovative digital lenders, including fintech’s and neobanks, are working to ensure SMEs get access to credit when they need it by:

1 Simplifying the application process: Digitizing and streamlining the application process means no long office visits, no waiting on hold to speak with credit officers, and no stacks of paperwork. Creating a simplified application process, including online portals with the ability to track progress, submit supporting documents online and negotiate repayment terms allows for headache-free applications.

2 Powering real-time risk analytics: Using real-time risk decisioning technology to access, integrate and analyze business financial data (like accounting documents and tax returns) allows you to make faster, more accurate decisions, without relying on personal credit scores.

3 Lowering the cost of approvals: With traditional decisioning technology, SME loans can be extremely expensive to process and approve. Automating the application process and using real-time data saves you time and money, allowing you to say yes confidently to more SME customers.

How to drive instant risk decisions for SME lending: Learn more

Say Hello to Data

It all starts with data. Being able to access, analyze and action useable data, in real-time, is the key to making smarter, more accurate decisions. With simple integrations to a variety of types of data, you can empower your team to quickly create connections to data that helps you understand the full health and future potential of an SME, including accounting software, tax information and bank accounts. However, just like individual consumers, many SMEs globally have a lack of formal credit histories. This is where the use of alternative data comes in. Alternative data for business lending includes shipping information, inventory levels, accounting software, web presence, and social media. Integrating a variety of data points allows you to expand your approval criteria and powers faster, more accurate loan decisions. See how using alternative data to power credit risk decisioning can help you grow your business.

Make Smarter Decisions, Faster

When we talk about faster, more accurate approvals, automation is king. Technology that supports automation of the entire decisioning process allows you to easily highlight potential fraud and risk, or flag applications that require more manual review. Automation also allows you to rapidly offer risk-based pricing and credit terms to applicants that are lower risk and push higher-risk applicants through additional checks. You still get to say yes, but you can do so confidently, knowing that your decisions are accurate.

Advance Your Analytics

To really step up your decisioning for SMEs, look to your risk analytics – does your solution empower your risk team to use the latest predictive analytics tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence? These tools help you not only decision loans faster, but they greatly improve the accuracy of your decisions, allowing you to expand your lendable market without increasing your risk. AI-powered technology enables you to make smarter decisions across the entire lifecycle and gets more accurate the more you use it. With AI, you can monitor model performance and accuracy and adjust as necessary, enabling maximum efficiency and accuracy as you continue to build on your SME lending strategy.

All-in-One Risk Decisioning

While it’s clear that easy data integration, automated decisioning and advanced analytics tools can help you accelerate your SME lending process, there is immense value in bringing those elements together into one unified platform. Connecting your credit decisioning, data integrations and AI models through a centralized user interface enables you to shorten your development cycle, get new products to market faster, and ultimately, improve your decisioning speed and accuracy across the entire customer lifecycle. Discover how to get smarter with unified access to AI-powered decisioning and data.