The Influence of Digital Technologies’ Development on Financing of Small Companies and Startups

Over the recent several years, the financial sector underwent substantial changes due to development of digital financial technologies, which stimulates the increase of the opportunities of access of small and medium-sized enterprises (hereinafter—SMEs) and startups to financial resources by means of appearance of P2P crediting, crowdfunding, and the tools of financing based on blockchain—in particular, ICO. In view of the dissemination speed of the technological progress achievements, these changes will continue and they cannot be ignored. This paper studies the influence of digital technologies development on the changes in the financial sources of SMEs and innovative startups. The purpose is to perform an empirical research of the influence of factors—primarily, digital—on the change of the volumes of SMEs alternative financing with the usage of a set of data from open information sources on financing of SMEs and startups in 17 countries. The research method is regression analysis. Its results show that the change of the volumes of ICO, number of Internet users, and volumes of venture financing has large influence on the changes of the volumes of SMEs alternative financing. The authors distinguish the main directions of the emerging technologies’ stimulating the improvement of SMEs access to financing and complexities that arise during their application. The results of the performed research could be used for further study of the factors that influence the development of alternative financing of SMES and startups.