Due to Basel II standards now mandatory across Switzerland, risk management will also become an issue to SMEs especially for these firm's credit rating and access to loans. In addition, Swiss parliament is currently discussing a reorganisation of the Swiss auditing law, which would force auditors to check whether an assessment of the relevant business risks was done by the respective company or not. Therefore, banks started developing ingenious rating systems to rate enterprises in different risk levels, determining credit costs directly as a function of the firm's inherent risk: The better the rating, the lower are interest rates on loans. Usually, these sophisticated rating systems for firms' risk are based on quantitative figures from firms' annual reports. Unfortunately, the lender's view on a company's risk structure is rarely identical with the firm's perception. Thus for SMEs it is important to identify and reconcile discrepancies between those viewpoints by research. There will also have to be identified new methods of risk management methods especially for SMEs which often lack funding and time to build up large-scale risk management systems.
