On Dec 4, 2025, BrukTech will sponsor the Nordic Banking Forum in Helsinki.
The theme of the Nordic Banking Forum 2025 calls on us to shift our focus from managing risk to enabling resilient growth. But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the biggest risk in SME financing isn’t the small businesses themselves. It’s the old, expensive structures trying to serve them.
The truth of the real cost
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Banks built their organizational structures for big corporate deals where manual work makes sense. When you use those same structures for small business financing, the numbers simply don’t add up.
A small business financing deal takes roughly the same time and paperwork as processing a huge corporate deal. But the fee you can charge is much smaller.
Traditional banking structures weren’t built for lots of small financing deals. Applications need manual checking, document review, legal work, and ongoing follow-up. Teams spend days on deals that bring in tiny fees.
Add expensive funding from traditional channels, and suddenly small business financing looks ‘high risk’ when really, it’s just high cost. The business isn’t the problem. The structure of the financing operation is.
Why slow manual work kills growth
A strong financing operation can handle volume without breaking and moves fast when markets change. It grows without needing to hire more people or to build expensive backend systems.
Traditional small business financing does none of this. When conditions change, slow manual processes can’t keep up. When opportunities appear, you can’t move quickly because every deal needs the same cumbersome workflow.
This isn’t being careful and compliant. This is being stuck with old ways of organizing work. Traditional financing institutions are fighting with expensive organizational models against competitors with cheaper, faster ones.
The actual cost is not the risk, but the structure
‘But small business financing must be expensive, because it’s so risky.’
Wrong. It’s expensive because the funding structures are designed for corporate banking. Traditional bank funding comes with heavy regulations, balance sheet limits, and cost structures that make small deals impossible to profit from.
Modern platforms give access to specialized funding built specifically for invoice financing with lower costs. No impact on your balance sheet. Structures built for volume, not for old-style relationship banking.
At BrukTech, we’ve handled tens of millions in small business receivable purchase financing with zero losses on our ecosystem. Through our platform’s automation, high-volume operations are profitable.
What modern structures look like
Compare two ways to finance a small business:
Old way: manual credit checks, account managers, legacy structures, expensive funding. Result: you can’t make money on anything under 100,000 € per invoice. Most small businesses are automatically excluded because of the so-called risk.
New way: automated checks, real-time monitoring and risk management, purpose-built operations, efficient funding. Result: you can profit on every invoice. Smaller team size, ten times the reach. The small business gets money fast, everybody wins.
The difference isn’t how brave you are with risk. It’s how your operation is organized.
From expensive old structures to modern operations
Europe is home to over 30 million small businesses, representing most of all companies across the continent. Any financier serious about future growth must find a way to serve them profitably. That doesn’t happen by trying harder with broken structures. It happens by reorganizing operations for the job.
Growing sustainably needs structures that make small business financing profitable. Not heroic efforts to force old organizational models to do things they were never designed for.
This means automation for routine decisions, and funding partners matched to what you’re doing. It means building operations that cost next to nothing to set up, not millions.
Many have spent decades building structures optimized for big corporate clients. But trying to use them for small business financing is like using a cruise ship as a water taxi. Wrong tool, wrong cost structure.
The technology exists. The funding models exist. What’s missing is admitting that expensive old structures are the problem, not the solution.
Let’s talk more about this at the Nordic Banking Forum.
AUTHOR
Joakim Malmström is the Co-founder of BrukTech, a company providing a platform that makes financing operations available for anyone without needing banking licenses or large amounts of capital. BrukTech has already handled tens of millions in financing with zero credit losses in 2025.
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