The article highlights the role of small- and medium-sized enterprises in social and economic development. It is mainly focused on assessing mechanisms and methods of direct and indirect credit backing given to small- and medium-sized businesses; the backing is given by the banking sector and government agencies. Comparing the performance of Russian and foreign small- and medium-sized enterprises, it becomes obvious that Russia falls behind the leaders and lacks favourable environment. The article emphasizes the need to change the participation of banking system in small- and medium-sized enterprise crediting. It is reasonable to increase the performance through simplifying the lending procedure: minimizing a personalized approach to issuing guarantees to borrowers; providing guarantees to banks on the basis of expert evaluation of methods and techniques implemented to assess borrowing capacity and type of transaction. The results obtained are to be of interest to domestic and foreign banking system and government agencies aimed at improving the performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises.