Fintech has quietly transformed how banking operations are conducted, payments settle in seconds, credit decisions are increasingly driven by algorithms, and from a smartphone we can now do what used to require an appointment to the bank.

While for large corporations, this shift has been a competitive weapon, for Europe’s small and medium-sized enterprises, the businesses that generate roughly two-thirds of the EU’s employment, it has too often been a competitive disadvantage.

That gap is not a footnote, it is becoming one of the more consequential, and least discussed, competitiveness problems facing European SMEs.

It would be easy to assume SMEs are simply unwilling to modernise butresearch tells a more specific story. SMEs have traditionally been underserved by the financial system, largely because banks have limited capacity to properly assess their financial position. Additionally, the side effect of post-crisis regulations aimed at making banks more resilient, ended up in reducing the flow of funds available to smaller businesses. Fintech firms moved into that space, but adoption on the SME side has lagged the supply of tools now available to use.

Academic reviews increasingly point to a skills dimension behind that delay. Institutions are only now beginning to assess fintech readiness in any systematic way, with some now trying to build curricula specifically to bridge the resulting skills gap, a sign that the shortfall isn’t a minor concern for educators, but a documented, structural one. This means that the tools exist, the financing models exist, but the capacity to evaluate and adopt them with confidence often doesn’t meet inside the SME itself.

Unlike a missed software upgrade, a fintech skills gap tends to be more complicated. Fintech has already improved lenders’ ability to collect and process accurate information about SMEs, cutting the information asymmetry and transaction costs that are used to slow lending down, and speeding up the whole system from building a channel of applicants through to screening, monitoring and repayment. An SME that isn’t fintech-literate isn’t just missing convenience, it’s more likely to appear opaque to lenders, slower to access financing, and less able to benefit from the very tools designed to make credit assessment fairer for smaller players.

Emerging approaches such as big data analytics and AI are changing how credit scoring works, allowing lenders to assess borrowers with limited financial history using non-traditional signals like digital footprints instead of years of paperwork. That’s a genuine opportunity for SMEs that have historically struggled to produce the documentation traditional lenders expect, but only for SMEs positioned to understand and engage with these new mechanisms in the first place. Without the skills to do so, the gap between fintech-ready firms and everyone else risks widening rather than closing.

If the problem is structural, the solution can’t be a single product or a single training. It needs to look more like infrastructure: a shared framework SMEs can use to assess where they actually stand, practical training that vocational education providers can deliver at scale, and open resources that don’t require a consultancy budget to access.

That is the foundation of the A2FINTECS project, an initiative that brings together partners from Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Malta, spanning academic research, vocational training delivery, technology, regulatory and fintech-sector expertise. Rather than treating fintech literacy as an add-on, the consortiumhas built an EQF-aligned Capability Building Framework that maps out stages of fintech maturity, a Skills Mapping Tool, and a multilingual Digital Learning Platform that vocational trainers can use to deliver the material directly to SME teams.

None of this means every SME needs to become a fintech company. It means the baseline level of fluency required to participate in a digitised financial system, reading what a lending algorithm is asking for, evaluating an open-banking tool, understanding what a digital cash-flow forecast actually means, is quietly becoming as fundamental as reading a balance sheet.

The businesses that will be prepared early won’t just save time, they’ll access financing faster, negotiate from a stronger position, and make decisions with better information than competitors still doing it the old way.

References

• “FinTech in small and medium enterprises (SMEs): A review and future research agenda.” ScienceDirect, 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263237323000841
• “FinTech and SMEs financing: A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374594875_FinTech_and_SMEs_financing_A_systematic_literature_review_and_bibliometric_analysis
• “Exploring mediating and moderating factors of FinTech adoption for innovations in SMEs.” Cogent Business & Management, Taylor & Francis, 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23322039.2024.2387443#d1e348
• A2FINTECS Erasmus + Project – Accelerating the Adoption of Fintech in SMEs. https://www.a2fintecs.eu