Connecting Credit Grantors and Credit Requestors: Towards the Electronic Exchange of Rating-Relevant Information

Before granting new credits, banks must gather qualitative and quantitative information about their prospective customers in order to start a rating process which allows them to assess the credit requestor’s risk class. Driven by intense structural changes within the financial industry and as a result of the specifications of the Basle II accord with regard to the rating process, banks are currently looking for new ways to improve the timeliness and quality of the rating-relevant data provided by credit requestors while at the same time reducing the costs of the rating process. Banks can achieve this by providing a platform for their prospective customers through which real-time financial data (e.g., daily cash flow data) can be transferred in an automated manner. We believe that real-time integration can be beneficial for both market sides, the banks as well as their prospective customers. Within this paper, we focus our attention on the credit requestor side. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and on the literature on innovation adoption, we develop a model of factors that affect the willingness of SMEs to adopt IOS for the purpose of providing real-time rating information to their credit banks. Within six exploratory case studies, we discuss this model with financial decision-makers of German SMEs