SMEs ecosystem and banking finance support in Serbia

There is increasing awareness that the current liquidity crisis could lead to a solvency crisis, as many SMEs compensate declining revenues by taking on more debt, often with government support. In 2020 the level of insolvencies and bankruptcies were kept in check, the number of bankruptcies is expected to spike in 2021. This raises the question of efficiency of ecosystem, about policy approaches to support SMEs in need of finance, while not overburdening them with debt, what motivated the authors of the paper to research the banking loans as the access to external sources of finance within the SMEs ecosystem support. Also is analyzed the quality of the sub-dimensions, the legal and regulatory framework, collateralization options, credit information systems and the financial literacy. Descriptive statistical methods, as well as field and desk research, were used in the elaboration of the results. Key results confirmed that SMEs create more lucrative returns to the whole national economy in the improved access to finance if provided with better service models enabled by technology and new propositions as clients - the hypothesis of the research.