Assessing the impact of public support programmes is key to fine-tune their design, increase their accountability and to assess their performance. There is little empirical evidence, however, on the impact of intermediated lending activities and their heterogeneous effect across businesses. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing the impact on firms’ performance of EIB-backed intermediated loans to circa 100,000 SMEs and mid-caps in the EU over the period 2008-2017. The results show that, relative to their peers, beneficiaries of the publicly supported loan programme experience significantly higher employment growth, firm growth and investment. Our findings also show that EIB lending provides stronger impulses when firms are closer to the borrowing limit. Firms in less developed regions benefit substantially more from the lending, relative to beneficiaries located in more developed regions. The underlying mechanism driving these outcomes is the improved access to finance facilitated by the loans, which enable financial institutions to extend credit to firms that are marginally excluded from traditional bank lending.