UK SMEs: traditional vs alternative finance comparison

This statistic shows an evaluation of alternative finance providers in the United Kingdom in comparison to traditional finance providers by UK small and medium enterprises in 2014. Of responding SMEs, 29 percent concluded that alternative finance providers are more willing to take risks than other finance providers their business had worked with so far.

Comparison between alternative and traditional finance providers according to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2014, by factor

Characteristic	Better	About the same	Worse
Lending/Investment standards	7%	38%	15%
Keeping information and money safe	8%	38%	18%
Know-how of own industry workings	14%	37%	17%
Moral standards	14%	32%	12%
Cost of capital	16%	36%	11%
Generating social returns on investment	16%	34%	10%
Generating financial returns on investments	17%	41%	7%
Accessibility	21%	36%	10%
Speed	23%	33%	10%
Flexibility	26%	33%	9%
Willingness to take risks	29%	29%	10%

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Release date

November 2014

More information

Region

United Kingdom

Survey time period

March to September 2014

Special properties

primary industry figures as well as extensive surveys of businesses and consumers

Supplementary notes

The percentages do not add up to 100% because the question was asked only to SMEs with previous experience dealing with alternative finance providers.

The methodology is clarified by the source as follows: "Four stages of research activity were carried out from March to September 2014. (1) Stage one involved collecting primary transactional data directly from alternative finance platforms. (2) Stage two consisted of designing and distributing model-specific questionnaires to survey funders and fundraisers of alternative finance. In total 15,658 users were surveyed. (3) Stage three conducted in association with ACCA and PwC included two external national surveys to understand the level of awareness among consumers of alternative finance. 2,007 consumers and 506 SMEs were surveyed. (4) Stage four was the industry-wide tracking survey among UK crowdfunding associations and P2P associations to gather industrial figures for year 2014. Transactional data was collected for quarters one to three of 2014."

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