Publications

The GPFI’s stocktaking of data available on financing for SMEs, both at the country level and at the client level of the major international development finance institutions, reveals serious gaps.  Annual aggregate data is captured annually for only a minority of the world’s countries by the IMF, OECD, and others. Little if any data is available at a country level on financing for women entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs or other key segments of interest to GPFI’s Financial Inclusion Action Plan.

In this recent COVID-19 Notes prepared by the World Bank and IFC, contributed by Ghada Teima, Global Lead Financial Sector Specialist at IFC, you will read an assessment on the impact and policy responses in support of private-sector firms in the context of the pandemic.

Summary

In this publication, you will read about the SME Finance Forum highlights in 2019.

Extract from the Foreword: The year 2019 has been a remarkable year for the SME Finance Forum — a year of continued, strong membership growth and effective delivery of member services. Since our launch in November 2015, we’ve grown from a few dozen committed early adopters into a global membership network.

This report, prepared by the World Bank, seeks to enhance practitioners’ understanding of the potential role that capital markets can have in SME financing in EMDEs. The report reviews global experiences with the use of capital markets solutions and, more generally, of market-based solutions to expand SME financing with a view to identifying key preconditions and challenges for EMDEs implementing the solutions.

The EIF Working Paper 2020/062: The Business Angel portfolio under the European Angels Fund: An empirical analysis.

This working paper, from member EIF, analyses the Business Angel (BA) portfolio of the European Angels Fund (EAF), which is an initiative of the European Investment Fund and engages in co-investment relationships with experienced business angels across Europe.

A “Thought-Starter” Contribution on Trade Finance to the 2020 G20 Process

This note analyzes the evolution of Credit Information Systems, including the emergence of new technologies that use alternative data in credit decisioning and the opportunities and risks associated with these trends. This paper also predicts the potential development effect of these disruptive technologies and proposes a role for the World Bank Group in leveraging these technologies to promote inclusion and stability. 

The Doing Business 2020 study, by the World Bank Group, shows that developing economies are catching up with developed economies in ease of doing business. This publication is the 17th in a series of annual studies investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 190 economies— from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—and over time.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published its final report on the Evaluation of the effects of financial regulatory reforms on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing, following a public consultation earlier this year.

Learn in this publication how member 4G Capital use machine learning technology to provide scalable credit services for individual clients in Kenya, where the MSME finance gap is over $19 bn, making it the largest in Eastern Africa.

They were able to measure the impact of their working capital credit, and they saw customers increase their revenue by 82% over the course of one year, being 74% of their customers women.