Entrepreneurial Finance Opportunities for Smes: Overcoming Credit Access Constraints

This book is about assessing the entrepreneurial finance opportunities for SMEs with a focus on financing mechanisms, market access constraints, and improvement strategies. The book specifically touches on the various finance opportunity mechanisms available to managers and owners o SMEs, the market access constraints associated with finance opportunity recognition, and the various strategies these owners and managers can use to their access to finance. In this book, the author argues that managers and owners of SMEs encounter constraints in the finance access process because they have weak finance access strategies. The author identifies various finance opportunity mechanisms including personal savings, partner/business angels, banks, traditional money lenders, government funding, trade credit, and mobile money loans. The author categorizes financial access constraints into two: supply-side constraints and demand-side constraints. Supply-side finance access constraints have to do with a lack of collateral or guarantors, inadequate financial records and accounts, information asymmetry, limited knowledge of business opportunities, high interest and other finance costs, inadequate technologies, poor credit experience or history, bureaucracy, a huge volume of work, a small amount of credit given, a long period of credit maturity, a line of business, and poor relationships. Demand-side finance access constraints have to do with lack of financial education and training, registration status, monetary policy, an inexperienced management team, legal status, distance to the source of credit, a poor business plan, fake documentation, loss aversion, and a low rate of return on capital. Owners and managers of SMEs can easily access credit from financial institutions by using good negotiation skills, maintaining strong relationships with financiers, having good understanding of the finance access process, getting good education and training, and building good finance opportunity skills and strong networking.