The Power of AI to Transform the Global SME Credit Landscape

Providing finance into the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector has been a slow, costly and difficult process for banks. That dynamic is now changing because of the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI). The Chinese firm JD Finance uses AI to recognize and analyse 30,000+ risk control variables, 300m+ user credit evaluations, 500+ models and 5000 risk strategies with which to help institutions better analyse risk. In the UK, Esme is using AI to speed up customer applications and provide AI chatbots to answer common customer questions during the application process. By monitoring customer behaviours within sectors, machine learning can predict the best time to approach a specific SME in a given sector with a specified amount of credit. AI in SME lending has brought in a shift that is allowing rapid and robust decision‐making to occur in delivering credit as a way of improving the health of entire economies.