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Financing Small & Medium Enterprises with Blockchain: An Exploratory Research of Stakeholders’ Attitudes

Obtaining the necessary financing can be a challenging task for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). To obtain such financing, SMEs must go through a lengthy assessment procedure that is costly for them as well as for financiers. Experience shows issues of trust, administrative costs, repetition, and data sensitivity may be at the root of these costs. With the emergence of blockchain technology, an opportunity arises whereby a shared ledger could alleviate these issues and support the financing procedure. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory research into the appetite of the stakeholders involved in two traditional financing procedures, namely invoice factoring and inventory finance, for adopting the blockchain technology in their part(s) of the procedure, as well as the envisioned changes to their respective careers. The results show the potential of blockchain in the financing procedure, and highlight the areas where it would have the highest impact.