A team from Bournemouth University has won a research bid to provide seminars addressing access to finance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The seminars will bring together keynote speakers from academia, government agencies and industry in order to discuss the most pertinent issues of SME finance and of credit risk, with a view to develop new research and policy agendas relevant to lenders and regulators.

The Access to Finance for SMEs workshops will be delivered after a successful bid to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s leading research and training agency addressing economic and social concerns.

Lending to SMEs is at the top of the agenda for governments around the world. With various political and economic incentives introduced to support SMEs, it is important not to overlook the practicalities of institutional arrangements for access to finance, especially in the environment of prudent lending.

The project team consists of BU’s Professor Jens Hölscher (Principal Investigator), and Co-Investigators Professor Andrew Mullineux and Professor Dean Patton, with colleagues from the University of Brighton, Aston University and the University of Nottingham.

In addition, the project team will collaborate with Professor Andreas Horsch and his colleagues from the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany, who will contribute on access to finance from Germany.