Benchmarking SME Banking Practices: What are the Lessons Emerging?

The banks have recently redesigned their organizational structure to support a strategy that focuses on addressing the SME segment. About half of the banks have organizational set ups which are less than two years old (while the SME models for 10 of the 11 banks are less than five years old) and only one surveyed bank sees its model as fully mature. Most of the surveyed banks separate small businesses from middle market clients and have shifted their organizational set-up from a geographic or functional focus to a business line focus. Four main business models have been identified and are highlighted in Chart 2. The chart reveals that five of the eleven surveyed banks use a model in which SME clients are read more…