Financial Instruments – AECM
What are Financial Instruments and Financial Intermediaries?
Since 1998 the European Union supports small and medium-sized enterprises with dedicated programmes that aim at improving SMEs access to finance. The principle of these financial instruments is easy : backed by funds from the EU budget, the implementing partner, a role that is currently reserved for the European Investment Bank group, hands out guarantees to financial intermediaries such as guarantee institutions. The guarantee institutions in turn use the guarantee from the EIB (European Investment Bank) group as a counter-guarantee to secure guarantees they issue themselves to their banking partners in order to allow them to grant loans to small and medium-sized enterprises.
AECM members are very early partners in the intermediation of EU financial instruments. The Austrian AECM member Bürges that later became part of aws was the first to use EU financial instruments in 1998. Many others followed. The original programme MAP (Multiannual Programme for SMEs) was followed by CIP (Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme) and finally by COSME (Programme for the Competitiveness of enterprises and SMEs). As of today, 20 AECM members are financial intermediaries of COSME that is implemented by the European Investment Fund (EIF). The COSME loan guarantee facility (LGF) had an initial financial allocation of EUR 1.3 billion and was topped up by funds from the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) alias Juncker-Plan.
Besides COSME, several other financial instruments are available at European level. InnovFin that is used by ten AECM members, allows for larger tickets of support to companies with innovative projects. CCS is a guarantee facility that is destined to the cultural and creative sector that is currently used by a few AECM members. The EaSI guarantee instrument that is dedicated to microfinance and social entrepreneurship is not used by AECM members.
For the next Multiannual Financial Framework from 2021 to 2027, it is planned to establish a programme that combines all EU financial instruments under the roof of one single programme with one single rulebook, called InvestEU, with four policy windows: 1) Sustainable infrastructure, 2) Research, Innovation and Digitalisation, 3) SMEs and 4) Social investment and skills. InvestEU is planned to have a financial allocation of EUR 15.2 billion allowing the Commission to provide a guarantee of EUR 38 billion to trigger total investments of EUR 650 billion. 75 % of the programme will be implemented by the EIB group whereas 25 % shall be implemented by NPBIs (national promotional banks and institutions) as well as by IFIs (international financial institutions). Some AECM members plan to become implementing partners themselves, some will be financial intermediaries under the EIF window and some plan to access InvestEU funds through both windows.
EIF presentation on COSME Implementation results
Access to finance portal of the European Union
Access to finance portal of the European Commission
Access to finance portal of the European Investment Fund
COSME page on the EIF website
InnovFin page on EIF website
EFSI page on EIB and EIF websites
Information on InvestEU
In June 2019, the European Commission published the following brochure with interesting COSME case studies in many of which AECM members are mentioned.
AECM Position papers on EU financial instruments
All papers can be found in the Position Papers Section
AECM, EAPB, ELTI, NEFI and SMEunited joined position paper: Comments on SME-related aspects of the proposed InvestEU Programme
BEST PRACTICES/Visibility
Please find our AECM brochure on best practice guarantee cases under this link.