Exploring Management Capability in SMEs Using Transactional Data

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become very important in most world economies. Governments have developed policies to support them and within the United Kingdom the government has encouraged lending to SMEs. Traditional relationship banking is based on the confidence a banker may have in the quality of SME’s management. Yet with a shift towards transactional quantitative risk assessment, there is a concern that Management Capability, which is critical to the success of a SME, is not necessarily captured by risk modelling. This paper reports findings from work on determining Management Capability from quantitative transactional measures. The study has used principal component analysis and partial least squares regression to elicit manifestations of Management Capability. The results indicate some success in determining measures for Management Capability.