The INE (Spanish National Statistics Institute) has just published its first survey on companies’ access to financing. Throughout 2010, 38% of SMEs received financing. In 25.2% of cases, credit was refused whilst in 24.2% they accessed part of the requested financing; in 50.6% of cases, they were granted the required financing. The figures are contrasted if we compare them to 2007, when 80.3% of the loans requested were granted whilst 9.8% were refused and 10% accessed part of the requested financing.

That is to say, refused credit has increased by 257% in just 3 years. The figure confirms the general feeling of 60% of SMEs, which consider that access to credit has worsened and that they will have serious difficulties accessing the necessary credit in the 2011-2013 period.

Beyond the economic reality and the institutions’ risk policies, it is striking that the banks’ internal bureaucracy is still highly manual. “The institutions have greatly modernised the front office, but in some back office operations they use surprisingly rudimentary techniques which lead them to unnecessary bureaucracy”, said Lidia Rovira, a Consultant at SGAIM (www.sgaim.es), a company specialising in Information Management. “We have developed a tool which enables the risk department to grant or refuse credit in less than three hours, eliminating awkward bureaucracy for the institutions and endless waits for the customer”, Rovira pointed out. “The experience of the institutions which have already introduced this system is that they gain internal efficiency and customer satisfaction”, she concluded.