The effect of relationship lending on SME's credit access

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Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2017

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management

Language

en

Pages

46

Series

Abstract

This thesis studies the effect of relationship lending on small to medium sized enterprises’ (SMEs’) credit access from the companies’ point of view. Relationship lending is a lending technique, which relies on the soft information collected about the lender over a period of the banking relationship. Soft information differs from hard information, in that, hard information is verified and publicly available financial data which does not require personal contact between the loan manager and the company. The research is based on a survey of 433 small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Finland. The relationship lending attributes measured in the study are “the role of informal information”, “the length of relationship with the primary bank” and “the frequency of contact with loan manager”. They are tested with a binary logistic regression over the binary dependent variable which measures whether the company accessed the amount of credit they primarily asked for or not. The results on the primary model support the hypothesis, that informal information plays a significant role in the credit decision process. The results indicate that if informal information had a major role in the loan decision process, that company was more likely to access credit. The hypotheses for the length of relationship and the frequency of contact with the loan manager were not supported by the model. However, on a secondary model, the frequency of contact with the role manager does have a significant impact on the role of informal information. This suggests, that the more often the company representatives are in contact with the loan manager, the more important is the role of informal information in the loan decision making process. This thesis contributes to the existing research on relationship lending by examining the concept from a firm perspective. Furthermore, the results support the earlier studies by suggesting that informal information had a major role in the loan decision making process and that higher frequency of contact increased the significance of informal information.

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Thesis advisor

Kautonen, Teemu

Keywords

relationship lending, credit access, informal information, soft information

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