Who we are

Mission

We are EIB Group's specialist provider of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) risk finance across Europe. We are owned by the European Investment Bank (EIB), with which we form the EIB Group, the European Commission and a wide range of public and private banks and financial institutions.

We have an unique shareholding structure as a public-private partnership and benefit from the Multilateral Development Bank status, which enables financial institutions to apply a 0% risk-weighting to assets we guarantee. Typically, we guarantee certain tranches of notes (senior and/or mezzanine tranches) issued through a SME securitisation transaction.

We do not provide finance to SMEs directly but our clients include a wide range of financial institutions, banks and venture capital funds involved in SMEs funding.

Objectives

By taking SME risk, we pursue two main statutory objectives:

• promote the implementation of European Union policies, notably in the field of entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, growth, employment and regional development;
• generate an appropriate return for our shareholders, through a commercial pricing policy and a balance of fee and risk based income

Resources (Mandates)

We operate using either our own funds or those made available by the European Investment Bank (through the Risk Capital Mandate), the European Commission (through the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme), by EU Member States or other third parties.

Geographical focus

We may carry out our activities in the European Union (EU) Member States, in EU Candidate and Potential Candidate Countries and in the  four States members of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland).