Abstract:

Currently, the financing difficulties of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are externally manifested as “financing difficulty” but at the core lie “financing expensiveness”. The essence of “financing expensiveness” lies in the high-cost nature of risk pricing mechanisms under the traditional financial model, forcing financial institutions to adopt “discriminatory interest rates” against SMEs to cover potential risks. From the perspective of “financial structure synergy”, this paper proposes reconstructing the risk pricing model through two-way digital empowerment. To alleviate the SMEs’ financing difficulties, it is essential to systematically advance the digitalization of risk management in financial institutions to reduce risk identification costs, and support the digital transformation of SMEs’ operations to provide a basis for risk pricing, thereby replacing group-based discriminatory pricing with personalized precision pricing. Finally, fintech platforms offer a scalable new paradigm for such personalized pricing through ecological models. From the perspective of risk pricing costs, this study provides a novel theoretical explanation and a systematic pathway for resolving SMEs’ financing difficulties.

Key words: SME Financing, FinTech, digital transformation, risk pricing, information asymmetry, financial structure synergy