Determining criteria affecting sme's bank choice with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method

People are faced with decision making about several issues in their daily lives. Some of the decisions we made in our daily lives may be such an easy one, on the other hand some could be complicated that it needs to be considered extensively. Looking from the viewpoint of businesses, implementation of decision making process and reaching a decision with this process is important, and they need to spend their time on this. Businesses usually handle multiple situations devoted to several criteria or objective that contradict with each other. In such circumstances, they use methods called multi-criteria decision making methods. Multi-criteria decision making methods provide to analyze data in an effective way and to use qualitative and quantitative methods together. Just like world-wide, Small and Medium Size Enterprise briefly so called SMEs have ever rising importance in Turkey. They are the basic building block of economies due to their numerical greatness, producing final product to consumer and intermediate goods to producer and creating employment. SMEs which have such an significance in economy, face with many problems during not only establishment but development process. The premise of these problems is finance issues. To solve these finance problems, banks are the most important parties they consult. For this reason, in the scope of this study criteria effecting SMEs' bank choices were defined and analyzed with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Thereby, suggestions for banks to gather new SME customers and retention of current SME customers in their portfolio were presented.