The Spanish stock exchange promotes the blockchain for access to credit for businesses

The Spanish stock exchange (BME) is planning to develop the second phase of experimentation to create a platform capable of facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises in raising finance through the issuance of equity loans within a blockchain network. The tests, conducted in collaboration with the companies of the SME financing ecosystem, take place in a sandbox environment, that is created specifically for the experimental phase and verification of the effects of development, hosted within the network of the Ministry of Economy and the country’s Digital Transformation. This is the second step towards the creation of the platform after the first pilot phase conducted in the summer of 2020 and successfully completed in collaboration with a series of investment services companies and investors. In this second test cycle, BME aims to promote internal competition in the sector by minimizing the entry barriers connected above all to raising capital through an Ethereum-based system that may be able to promote the use of digital assets for financing. of small and medium-sized enterprises. The project also involves the creation of a digital wallet that allows both the conservation and the use of electronic money for the necessary investments, all of which has the ultimate aim of facilitating access to finance for small and medium-sized companies. who have little chance of obtaining the same service from the banking system. The solutions based on distributed ledgers aim, in fact, to massively simplify the financing operations to which SMEs can have access. The project is integrated into the pilot program based on blockchain technology, carried out and concluded by BME in 2019, for the elimination of physical certifications through their digitization. A program that has allowed the reduction of processing times by more than 80%. The distributed registers make available to users not only procedures with a greatly reduced timeframe but capable of guaranteeing full legal certainty of electronic certificates, while maintaining the highest level of privacy.