Financial Indicators For The Romanian Companies Between Eligibility And Bankability Of Eu Financed Projects

The main goal of this research is to compare the eligibility indicators for accessing EU projects with the bankability indicators at the level of Romanian companies. This study was realized in a period when the term of bankability seems to be in the focus of the beneficiaries and management authorities for European funding, of the banking system and of the mass-media as well. This happens for the first time since the launch in 2007-2008 of the main structural EU funding programs focusing on the development of competitive SMEs, which brought significant changes in the EU funding environment. The same with the public institutions, many SMEs have applied for grants in order to finance their investments using different funding programs, especially under the European Regional Development Fund. This process to obtain European funding was a long one in term of evaluation and contracting periods. Under this context, the initial success of SMEs that have successfully applied and even managed to gain access to European funding was overshadowed by another sharper problem: lack of financial resources for co-financing to support investments or expenditures in the initial stages funding the project. This was also a big problem since the start of word financial and economic crisis. Under this context the banking sector was supposed to be heavily involved in ensuring external financing. The main difficulties in co-financing European funding projects by the banks came from the fact that the companies were requested to obtain satisfactory scores in order to qualify for the banking loans. Several indicators were used by the banking sector to analyze the creditworthiness of the applicant companies. From these indicators we selected five of them to be tested by using Student distribution modelling within the ModelRISK – VoseSoftware application over a group of 50 companies located in the North-Western region of Romania. After the model was created in this paper we tried to validate it. During the validation process of the model were observed differences between the relevancy of the proposed indicators in the analysis of the selected companies creditworthiness and also in the investment analysis itself.