Improving Financial Accessibility of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Through Fintech

With the remarkable advances in IT technologies, a range of financial services combining finance and technology have been developed in the financial sector, thereby leading to increased convenience for financial customers. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which have served as the foundation of the Republic of Korea and most Asia economies, have been marginalized from the benefits of these new technologies and continue to face difficulties in gaining access to finance. In this regards, our study will identify the difficulties which SMEs are facing in relation to financing and introduce cases to enhance the financial accessibility of SMEs through the convergence of financial services for SMEs and new financial technologies. This chapter examines financial technology (Fintech) that can satisfy such needs and attempts to resolve the financial exclusion of SMEs by establishing a new evaluation infrastructure that evaluates the current business activities of corporations by tapping into Big Data such as dynamic and non-financial alternative data that has otherwise been unused. In addition, we introduce a non-face-to-face finance service online platform which reduces SMEs’ physical difficulties in accessing finance and enables 24-hour, 365-day financial service. We found that Big Data on SMEs’ business activities and platform can improve the accessibility of SMEs to finance.