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This paper asks how well the use of quantitative and qualitative variables can improve the assessment of companies' creditworthiness and how this result can be influenced by the economic and financial peculiarities of countries. We harden qualitative variable measures to model soft information aimed at scoring microfirms, small, and medium‐sized firms. The structural survey covers Germany, Italy, and the UK in a sample of about 17 thousand companies observed during the financial crisis. Soft facts are determined within the balanced scorecard framework in order to find out the impact of customers, business processes, learning and growth, and financial perspectives. Our findings show that credit models integrating soft variables optimize the risk estimation, but estimates are country‐specific and should be tailored to the characteristics of each economic system.

The research aims to verify whether the credit risk of small and medium-sized enterprises can be estimated more accurately using qualitative variables together with financial information from reports. In our paper, we select qualitative variables within the conceptual framework of the balanced scorecard to assess the credit quality of Italian companies of various sizes, from micro to medium. Data were collected to estimate the company’s resilience following the shock of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The analysis based on customer size, processes, knowledge, and corporate finance, synthesized with balanced scorecard methodology, allows us to estimate the resilience of companies in a period of crisis. The research highlights the important contribution of qualitative variables for the estimation of credit risk. The implications concern both financial intermediaries and their supervisory functions, and regulators for rating models based on soft forward and countercyclical variables.