Ask a European small-business owner what nearly killed the company in its first years, and the answer is rarely the product or the market. More often it is a sentence from a bank: not this time. A workshop with full order books, a hauler that needs one more truck, a food producer waiting ninety days to be paid by a supermarket, all of them can be turned away not because they are bad businesses, but because they are small ones.
This is not a story about greedy banks. It is a story about how bank capital is priced, and about the arithmetic that quietly decides which loans get made.
The problem is not demand – It is the plumbing
Europe does not lack small companies that want to borrow. It lacks a cheap way for banks to say yes to the small ones.
The pattern shows up consistently in the European Central Bank’s twice-yearly Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE). Small and medium-sized enterprises report financing obstacles at roughly twice the rate of large firms, and the share of SMEs naming serious obstacles to bank finance recently reached its highest level in years.
A meaningful slice of the constrained group are so-called discouraged borrowers—firms that need a loan and simply never apply because they expect to be refused. That expectation is usually correct.
The European Investment Bank’s investment survey tells the same story from the price side: the proportion of EU firms unhappy with the cost of finance jumped from around one in twenty a couple of years ago to well over one in five. The gap between what smaller firms need and what banks will extend has been widening again through 2025 and into 2026, even as headline interest rates came off their peak.
Basel III, in one paragraph
Here is the mechanism most coverage skips. Under the Basel III framework — the international rulebook that governs how much capital a bank must hold — every loan a bank makes has to be backed by a cushion of the bank’s own capital, sized to the estimated risk of that loan. A loan to a small, unrated company carries a heavier capital charge than a loan to a large, investment-grade one.
On top of that, the work of assessing a €200,000 loan to a family manufacturer is not much cheaper than assessing a €20 million loan to a corporate — the analyst hours, the compliance checks, the monitoring are broadly fixed.
Put those two facts together, and you get the small-ticket problem: the loan a small firm needs is the loan on which a bank earns the least, relative to the capital and effort it consumes. Nothing here is malicious. It is simply that the economics of a well-capitalised bank point away from small, unrated, illiquid credit — exactly the credit that a large part of the European economy runs on.
Who fills the gap
When the largest lenders retreat from a segment, others move in. In Europe the gap has been filled by a patchwork: public instruments, specialist non-bank lenders, and, increasingly, platforms that let private investors lend directly to businesses.
On the public side, the European Investment Fund guarantees portfolios of SME loans through programmes such as InvestEU; by late 2024 those guarantees had reached well over ninety thousand final recipients and several billion euros in supported financing. That helps, but it does not close the gap — and it was never designed to.
Alongside the public tools sits the market that has grown up over the last decade: crowdlending, or business peer-to-peer lending. The idea is straightforward. A platform sources a borrowing company, assesses it, publishes the terms, and lets many individual investors each fund a slice of the loan.
The investors earn interest if the borrower repays; they can lose money if it does not. The platform is the intermediary and the record-keeper — not a bank, and not a guarantor.
Maclear, a Swiss crowdlending platform, is one example of this model. It connects individual investors with European small- and medium-sized business borrowers, publishes terms for each project, and acts as the collateral agent — the party that holds and, if necessary, enforces the security behind a loan on behalf of the investors. It is worth being precise about what that model is and is not.
Platforms like this are not banks; investor money is not a deposit, is not covered by any deposit-insurance scheme, and can be lost in full or in part if a borrower defaults. Returns are not fixed or guaranteed. A reserve mechanism may bridge some missed interest payments, but it cannot promise that either interest or principal will be repaid in full.
Regulatory status varies by country and is easy to overstate: Maclear, for instance, is a member of the Swiss self-regulatory organisation PolyReg for anti-money-laundering purposes, and is not directly licensed or supervised by Switzerland’s financial market authority, FINMA.
None of that makes the model good or bad. It makes it a different risk, sitting in the space the banks have priced themselves out of. For the small firms in that space, more sources of capital is unambiguously better. For the investors funding them, it is a higher-yield, higher-risk asset class that rewards the same due diligence a bank would do — read the project, understand the collateral, size the position, and assume the money is at risk.
The takeaway
The European SME financing gap is not a scandal to be exposed; it is a structural feature of how regulated bank capital is priced. That is exactly why it persists, and why a layer of non-bank finance has grown around it. Whether that layer belongs in any individual’s portfolio is a question for that person and, ideally, a licensed adviser — not for a headline.
This guest contribution is general information and editorial commentary, not financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Lending to businesses through any platform carries risk, including the partial or total loss of the money invested; past results do not indicate future outcomes. Any platform named is one example among several and is not a recommendation.
Related: What is P2B lending — and how does it differ from P2P?