Organization and Problems of Lending to Small and Medium Business in Russian Banks

One of the key drivers of economic growth is the category of small and medium-sized businesses, the stimulation of which increases entrepreneurial activity, which contributes to the development of various industries and markets, the creation of new jobs, and the growth of competition. As of the end of 2019, the share of SMEs in the Russian economy is 22.9%, and the national project "Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and Support for individual Entrepreneurial Initiative", designed for 2019-2024, provides for an increase in the contribution of this sector to GDP to 32.5% by 2024. Accordingly, the state strongly promotes the development of small and medium-sized businesses, and we should expect an increase in the number of new entrepreneurs. As practice shows, at the beginning of their activities, most enterprises have relatively small equity capital and in order to maintain and expand their business, they attract external sources of financing – loans from credit institutions. From the point of view of banks, the assessment of the borrower's credit risk is one of the most difficult tasks, and taking into account the fact that SMEs have low financial stability, in some cases they submit a shortened form of accounting statements - such conditions create additional difficulties in accurately assessing the creditworthiness of companies belonging to this category. Taking into account the planned growth of SMEs as a sector, the number of applications to banks for credit funds will only grow, therefore, the question arises about the ability of banks to bear the increasing volume of increased risks of the loan portfolio, whether banks can afford to finance the influx of new enterprises. In the context of changing corporate business environment, it is important to correctly adapt the approaches used to assess the creditworthiness of small and medium-sized businesses, taking into account the current situation, which explains the relevance of this study. The purpose of this work is to study modern approaches to assessing the creditworthiness of corporate borrowers, as well as to develop a statistical model for predicting the probability of default in relation to Russian small and medium-sized businesses. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were identified: 1. To study the main fundamental approaches to the construction of statistical models for assessing the creditworthiness of corporate borrowers, to compare them; 2. To study the Russian and foreign experience of applying statistical models in banking practice; 3. To investigate the factors that best characterize the creditworthiness of enterprises, taking into account the specifics of SMEs; 4. Create a sample of data that represents a number of observations on small and medium-sized enterprises in the form of various performance indicators; 5. Build a statistical model that predicts the probability of bankruptcy, based on the collected data on small and medium-sized enterprises. Thus, the object of this study is small and medium-sized businesses, and the subject of the study is the assessment of the creditworthiness of this category of enterprises. In order to perform the tasks set, a number of research methods are used in this work: - Study of literature and Internet resources - to determine approaches to building statistical models and identify company performance indicators that can be included in the final model; - Collection of quantitative and qualitative statistical data-for the formation of the sample on which the model is built; - Regression analysis - as a way to build a statistical model.