Facilitating SME financing through improved Credit Reporting- Report of the International Committee on Credit Reporting, chaired by the World Bank  (Draft Version for Public Comments), March 2014.

“This report is one of the concrete outputs of the work following the General Principles.  It addresses one of the most significant problems that limit the ability of most Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) around the world to obtain adequate external financing to underpin their productive activities: information asymmetries. Creditors assess the creditworthiness of credit/loan applicants based on two basic criteria: their financial capacity or ability to repay a loan, and their willingness to repay the loan. Due to information asymmetries, however, not all necessary information to assess creditworthiness of applicants is available to creditors. In addition, gathering information that is not readily or easily available is overly costly. These problems are normally exacerbated in the case of SMEs, and are often a cause of the denial of loans and other forms of external financing to them.”