A more trusted route to SME capital markets

DEUSS explores a future where an SME can issue a digital bond and investors across Europe can find the bond, assess the issuer, bond information, and supporting data with greater confidence.

The goal is not to replace regulated financial infrastructure. It is to make bond issuing more accessible for SMEs and key trust points in the bond lifecycle easier to verify across borders.

SME bond issuance is difficult to scale across borders

SMEs are central to Europe's economy, but accessing capital markets across borders remains complex. Bond issuance involves multiple actors, documents, and manual verification steps that drive up operational expenses before an issuer can even reach investors.

For smaller issuances, these massive fixed costs and administrative layers make the entire process unfeasible. Issuers, investors and market actors need trusted information about company identity, authority, bond terms, ownership, and lifecycle events — often across different jurisdictions and without triggering high administrative fees.

High coordination costs

SME-scale bond issuance involves fixed costs and operational steps that make smaller funding rounds financially unmanageable under traditional frameworks.

Cross-border verification

Issuers and investors operating across Member States need reliable ways to verify identity, eligibility, authority, and supporting information.

Fragmented lifecycle data

Bond terms, investor records, transfers, payments, and reporting events may sit across different systems, creating reconciliation and audit efforts for the actors involved.

Reusable trust for digital bond issuance

Digital bond issuance can become more scalable when trusted information does not need to be recreated at every step.

By connecting issuer identity, investor eligibility, bond information, and lifecycle events through a shared verification layer, DEUSS not only breaks down the financial barriers to capital markets, but can help reduce repeated checks and improve transparency across the financing process.

For SMEs, this can support more accessible routes to capital. For investors and market actors, it can create clearer, more consistent information across jurisdictions.

DEUSS: digital bond infrastructure for SME financing

DEUSS is a cross-border project exploring how SMEs can issue digital bonds through infrastructure built on EBSI.

Led by the Czech Technical University in Prague, with 18 partners across universities, tech providers, alternative finance platforms, and policy organizations (including Alastria, INATBA), the project connects digital securities workflows with EBSI's trust infrastructure to support issuer verification, investor onboarding, and bond lifecycle transparency.

EBSI provides the shared trust layer. DEUSS builds the marketplace and financing workflow around it, helping connect SMEs, investors, and relevant financial actors without replacing existing market infrastructure.