Nesta: Banks overlook fast growing companies

UK banks are missing crucial opportunities for profitable lending to high growth companies, according to a new report.

The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) suggests the credit-scoring systems banks use to make lending decisions exaggerate the riskiness of such businesses, sometimes known as "gazelles", the FT reports. The research implies the companies on which the UK will rely to create jobs over the next few years encounter greater difficulty in accessing finance compared with slower growth companies. Nesta calculated 7% of businesses with more than 10 employees generated 49% of the new jobs between 2007 and 2010, but the same expanding companies were judged by banks l...