To facilitate the use of financial instruments set up at national, regional, transnational or cross-border level and managed by or under the responsibility of the managing authority in accordance with Article 38(3)(a) of Regulation (EU) No 1303/2013, rules on standard terms and conditions for certain financial instruments should be established. Those standard terms and conditions would make those instruments ready to use — the so-called off-the-shelf financial instruments.

To facilitate the use of financial instruments, the standard terms and conditions need to ensure compliance with state aid rules and facilitate the delivery of Union financial support of final recipients through a combination of financial instruments and grants.

Given that the State aid rules do not apply to agricultural activities supported under the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, compliance with the standard terms and conditions should be voluntary. For other activities receiving support from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, general State aid rules apply and therefore, the standard terms and conditions should be mandatory.

The standard terms and conditions should also include a minimum set of governance requirements to ensure proper management of the financial instruments in order to provide for more detailed rules than those included in the Regulation (EU) No 1303/2013.

In order to support SMEs growth in a difficult funding environment, a portfolio risk sharing loan (‘RS loan’) is an appropriate financial instrument. The RS loan provides new loans to SMEs with easier access to finance by providing financial intermediaries with funding contribution and credit risk sharing and thereby offering SMEs with more funds at preferential conditions in terms of interest rate reduction and/or collateral reduction.

Financing through the RS loan may be a particularly effective way of supporting SMEs in a context of limited availability of funding or relatively little risk appetite of the financial intermediaries for certain sectors or type of SMEs. In this context, the standard terms and conditions are an effective way to address such market failure.

In order to provide an incentive to financial intermediaries to increase lending to SMEs covered by Union funded guarantees, a capped portfolio guarantee is an appropriate financial instrument.

The capped portfolio guarantee should address the existing gap in the debt market for SMEs supporting new loans by providing credit risk protection (in the form of a first loss portfolio capped guarantee) with the aim to reduce the particular difficulties that SMEs face in accessing finance because of the lack of sufficient collateral in combination with the relatively high credit risk they represent. In order to achieve the expected impact, the Union contribution to the capped portfolio guarantee should, however, not replace equivalent guarantees received by the respective financial institutions for the same purpose under existing Union, national and regional financial instruments. In this context, the standard terms and conditions are an effective way to address such market failure.

In order to incentivize the energy saving potential arising from the renovation of residential buildings, a renovation loan is an appropriate financial instrument.

The renovation loan should target long term subsidised loan conditions and upfront technical support and funding of residential building owners to prepare and implement building renovation projects. It also assumes a financing market in which banking intermediaries are essentially the only source of funding, but where this funding is either too little (due to the risk appetite of the intermediary), too short term, too costly or otherwise inappropriate for the long term payback nature of the projects being financed. This, together with an inefficient system of identifying and procuring the works on behalf of multiple apartment owners without excluding the possibility to support individuals, constitutes a market failure. In this context, the standard terms and conditions are an effective way to address such market failure.

The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the Coordination Committee for the European Structural and Investment Funds,