There exists a wide variety of creditors on the Swedish credit market, commercial banks, savings banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies etc. This thesis focuses on banks as creditors which fundamental business concept concerns granting credits to firms and private persons. Credit assessment is the evaluation of the risk of a debtor not paying back the borrowed amount. For a bank to evaluate the risk of a firm, various sources of infor-mation about the credit applicant need to be obtained and analysed, for example annual re-ports and credit references. To decide whether a bank should grant a credit application or not, the bank uses existing credit guidelines which assist them in their decision-making. The credit management poses an important role since it is up to them to analyse whether the firm is creditworthy or not. Thus the role of the banker is very important.

There has been a lot of prior research on bankers’ credit assessment of companies and most of this research has been conducted through a qualitative perspective. Previous stud-ies have investigated how creditors combine different factors in their credit assessment and what factors are the most important. The purpose of this thesis is to examine what factors are actually taken into consideration by Swedish bankers in their credit evaluation of firms and to assess the relative importance of these. The authors will also compare whether these factors comply with literature and previous studies. In order to reach our purpose we have used a quantitative approach in the form of a survey sent out to bankers. Our selected sample has consisted of bankers employed at three different banks; Handelsbanken, SEB and Nordea. These banks represent three of the four largest banks in Sweden and we be-lieve they represent a good mix of customers.

Our study has given us a result that partly confirms and partly differs from previous stud-ies. The ten most important factors of credit assessment our selected sample of bankers consider are; company management, business ratio; cash flow, business idea, personal characteristics, trust, own contributed capital, budgets and calculations, business ratio; profitability, customer relation and business ratio; liquidity. When analysing our data we have found that factors are evaluated dif-ferently between gender of the banker, type of bank, location, position of the banker and years of employment of the banker.