Fintech Disruption of SME Continues

The latest edition of the Disruption Index which tracks change in the small business lending sector, and more generally, across financial services has been released. The latest score is 38.39%

The Financial Services Disruption Index has been jointly developed by Moula, the lender to the small business sector; and research and consulting firm Digital Finance Analytics (DFA).

Knowledge of Non-bank Financial Providers

Further to the Business Data observation, we are seeing actual evidence of SME awareness of alternate financial offerings through data (eg. evidence of payments received from and made to alternative lenders; credit enquiries at the credit bureaus). At 11% of all data sets reviewed this quarter (above 10% for the first time), this appears to be forming a continuing, upwards trend.

Service Expectation

SMEs are becoming more demanding of their financial service providers, as we continue to see a collapse in their expectation of how long it should take for a loan application through to a decision. The latest data shows this number is below 5 days for the first time… at 4.8 days.

Business data in the cloud

SME’s continue to show a willingness to provide electronic data access in return for access to credit, with this quarter’s % of SME’s increasing to 16.2% from last quarter. It feels we are almost now at a tipping point, where businesses are moving into the ‘comfortable’ range in permissioning data, especially if there is economic and ease-of-process upside from doing so.

Loan Processing Speed

Time taken to execute loans was impacted by April’s 3 x 4 day weeks (school and public holidays), which slowed down the pace at which SMEs completed their loan applications and pushed out average total loan time elapsed to 36 hours… still well inside the Service Expectation measure observed (ie. fintech is doing its bit to meet and drive service expectation).

Smart Devices

The proportion of SMEs with smart devices has risen – now well over half of all SMEs at 54%

Read more on the Disruption Index Site.

Author: Martin North

Martin North is the Principal of Digital Finance Analytics

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