ACCA welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Open call for evidence: Small business access to finance issued by the Department for Business & Trade and HM Treasury. ACCA takes a strong interest in business practices, including the businesses our members work in and those they support through practice-based work.

ACCA continues to advocate for improvements that ensure SMEs can access the finance they need to develop and grow. In addition to sharing the latest insights from our Global Economic Conditions Survey (GECS), we offer perspectives related to late payment, SME funding channels, service levels, and use of digital technologies.

ACCA makes the following suggestions:

• We call on the government to encourage financial institutions to enhance their SME focused support and education in order to help organisations take advantage of the wide range of financing opportunities. This includes emphasising the importance of business credit scores and the more favourable terms they can lead to.
• The government should continue its focus thinking small first with an emphasis on improving service levels for all SMEs interaction with it.
• Greater consistency is needed for timeframes associated with opening business accounts, research on the viability for AML-supervised firms to share greater information, along with more dedicated support from banks for SMEs.
• SME adoption of Open Banking can save SMEs time and open a host of financing options. We encourage government to address the barriers that might be holding back wider uptake.
• ACCA sees value in funders regularly publishing statistics that shed light on the proportion of applications approved, agreed-in-full, partially agreed, and/or rejected. We believe that the release of such information can help enhance transparency.

Please download the consultation document found on this page to read our full response.