Encouragement Bank has become a full-fledged member of the Network of European Financial Institutions for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (NEFI).
NEFI was founded in 1999 and consists of 12 financial institutions from 12 member states of the European Union: ALMI (Sweden), AWS (Austria), Oseo/BDPME (France), Finnvera (Finland), Hipoteku Banka (Latvia), ICO (Spain), KfW Bankengruppe (Germany), MCC (Italy), MFB (Hungary), SNCI (Luxembourg), SZRB (Slovakia) and Encouragement Bank (Bulgaria).
These institutions share a public mission to facilitate the access to finance for SMEs by offering them financial services and expertise. This mission was entrusted to them by the government and/or the legislation in force in their respective countries. All NEFI partners act complementarily to and in co-operation with the national banking system through co-financing, risk-sharing, expertise and advice in order to address shortcomings in the SME financial markets.
In the past year NEFI institutions actively supported and financed a total of more than 117,000 SMEs all over Europe with about EUR 20 billion of financing in the form of loans and guarantees.
