Last week I was privileged to be invited to join Professor Karen G. Mills for a dinner with several professors from Imperial College Business School, London and a number of London-based entrepreneurs working on applying big data to support better lending and investment decisions to SMEs using new types of AI and algorithms.  The discussion shows the astonishing range of non-financial data that can be captured about a business.

With over 50% of jobs in the UK and US and many other industrialised countries in SMEs, these innovative new data streams, particularly non-financial measures, have the power to illuminate the opaque nature of small business finances, providing more transparency and thus confidence to lenders.  

Professor Mills believes the difficulties small business has had in obtaining credit can be addressed by attracting new financiers using AI to improve lending decisions and at lower cost. This should invigorate SMEs as an important source of innovation and employment in our economies.

This rich source of data will also provide investigators with a much wider pool of data for due diligence, verification and court purposes, areas where my firm is particularly active.

Professor Mills served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet and as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013.  She is now a Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School and a member of the Entrepreneurship Faculty. 

She included this inscription in a copy of her latest book on this topic: Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream.

Vero Consulting uses financial and non-financial data to support SMEs with business valuation, compensation and other dispute resolution services.

To learn more about the firm’s expertise, click here, or please contact me for a without-commitment discussion at enquiries@veroconsulting.expert or click here.

Charles Lazarevic

19 November 2019