Comment justifier la multibancarité au sein des PME ?

Our thesis focuses on SMB bank financing in France. This Kind of firms tends to borrow from more than one bank to finance their investments in recent years. The choice of multiple bank relationships by SMB leads us to formulate two questions i) What are the determinants of the choice of number of banks by firms? ii) How the financial and non financial conditions of credit contract are they affected by the choice of the number of banks of SMB? To answer the theoretical assumptions formulated on these issues, we perform econometric tests on a sample of 144 French SMB. The data concern the year 2009 and come from a survey. These data are unique, recent, are not available in any database and completed by accounting data. The results of the econometric study show that the number of banks is even higher than the degree of informational opacity of the firm is low. Econometric tests also show that there is a positive and significant relationship between the number of the banks and the risque of exposure to credit rationing. Firm’s quality seems to be an important determinant of the number of banks and the conditions of credit contract, but its effect remains ambiguous.