What’s the current status of digital SME lending in the CEE region? Last year, 24 banks and non-banking financial companies offered online or mobile loan applications for SMEs. This year, based on the results of our Digital SME Lending Study CEE 2024, this number counts as 30. And 21 financial companies in the CEE offer a fully digital SME lending process. This increase happened mainly due to new SME Lending fintech players, which are entering the market.
It makes me wonder whether banks still have an appetite for SME loans. There seems to be a noticeable disproportion in the market. Banks are becoming more restrictive in their lending policies to SMEs, while fintechs have a risk appetite for SME loans, and are entering the market to fill that gap, but at a higher cost. As a result, SMEs are faced with higher interest rates, making access to financing more expensive. Meanwhile, banks continue to profit from deposits. Is the traditional role of banks in SME lending changing?
During the respective Panel at our upcoming CEE24 SME Banking Conference (November 15, in Vienna and remotely), we will discuss this situation with Amadeus von Kummer – CMO from Teylor – German SME fintech lender, and Balazs Topor – SME Product & Segment Leader at Raiffeisen Bank International.
Tomas Tagliani (COO and Co-founder at Falcondale)Â will bring to that discussion a tech perspective and present how technology can help in reaching the efficiency of digital SME lending. Lukasz Kawulok will present VSoft‘s use case of Credit workflow in the low-code platform. Christian Ruehmer will share Q-Lana‘s perspective on that. Kamil Goslawski from CRIF Poland will share how they can help in assessing SME customers better with data.
The panel will be preceded by a fireside chat between Sergii Demchuk (CEO at Novalend) and Piotr Biegun (COO at Algolytics) about the journey of building Novalend, a digital SME lending finetch in Poland.
Last year, at the CEE23 SME Banking Conference, we had a panel discussion about How to accelerate digital SME Lending. Watch the whole panel below:
Join this conversation this year 📅on November 15 in Vienna or remotely.
