Abstract: The availability credit financing remains limited for SMEs and the root cause lies in information asymmetry. big data credit is a key to solving this problem, but its construction needs to be strengthened. For this purpose, this paper takes the SME board and the carve out board in 2013-2017 as the research samples, and uses the hierarchical linear model to analyze the relationship between the construction of big data credit and SMEs’ credit ability from both macro and micro perspectives. The study shows that, big data credit construction can indeed improve SMEs’ credit capacity, and this effect has an increasing trend with the passage of time. At the same time, the effect is affected by the interaction of soft and hard information of enterprises and the level of regional financial development. Therefore, it is advised to strengthen the top-level design of big data credit, improve institutional guarantee system, expand the application scenario of big data credit, promote financial system innovation and reform, and give full play to the synergy effect of big data credit in order to comprehensively improve the credit ability of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Key words: big data credit, small and medium-sized enterprises, credit utility, hierarchical linear model