Small and Medium-Sized enterprises (SMEs) make up a large majority of businesses globally and play a crucial role in global economic development through job creation, economic growth, and innovation. For the health of the global economy, it is imperative that they have access to the needed credit to grow and expand. Credit infrastructure remains an important element in ensuring that SMEs (and others) have access to credit when needed and at the lowest possible cost. In order to ensure that SMEs have access to the credit they need and in order to improve existing credit infrastructures, the G20 endorsed an Action Plan on SME financing in 2015. This action plan includes measures aimed at improving the three Credit Infrastructure (CI) priority areas: Credit Reporting Systems (CRS), Secured Transactions & Collateral Registries (STCR), and Insolvency Regimes. In 2016, the Action Plan was converted into an implementation framework, a country self-assessment, which benchmarks the current policy and regulatory state in the three CI areas to agreed-upon international standards.The G20 countries have carried out their initial self-assessments in 2017 as a baseline to enable measuring future progress in the implementation of priority reform.

The initial self-assessment utilized a methodology aimed at capturing the strengths and areas of potential improvement for each G20 member state in each of the priority areas. Responses were self-reported by G20 countries and were compiled and consolidated in this baseline report by the World Bank Group (WBG).