What we do

Our central mission is to support Europe's small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) by helping them to access finance. To this end, we aim at satisfying existing and future market needs by designing innovative financial products addressed to our partners (banks, guarantee, leasing and microfinance institutions, private equity and venture capital funds, among others), acting as our financial intermediaries. 

By offering an Integrated Risk Finance Product Range of SME finance to our intermediaries, we complement the products offered by the European Investment Bank (EIB) with which we form the EIB Group.

While our equity instruments aim to improve the availability of risk capital for high-growth and innovative SMEs, we also target the debt requirements, as many SMEs seek finance through this more traditional route. Therefore we also provide guarantees and credit enhancement through securitisation to improve the lending capacity of our financial intermediaries and thus the availability and terms of debt for beneficiary SMEs. We carry out our activities in the European Union (EU) Member States, in EU Candidate and Potential Candidate Countries and in the European Free Trade Association Countries.