Looking towards SME Finance

The importance of SME's in building viable economies is often overlooked,Alan Patricof of Apax partners stated, "You could find tons of people who’d give you loans for $1,000 at 3 or 4 percent a month, but you can’t build businesses on that,"At a Brookings Blum roundtable it was noted that, "...With scalable models for microfinance increasingly well established, attention is shifting to the SME sector, where enterprise needs are more complex and there are fewer successful models. Although SMEs have correspondingly higher needs for capital than microfinance, the problem is not so much the amount as the type of capital needed. The class of SMEs with the greatest potential for high-yielding investment and innovation is too small and unproven to depend on commercial loans or internal cash flow, and simultaneously too large and risky to rely on modest short-term microcredit loans..."