Two questions, six months of statements, and a straight answer.
Most of what follows is what happens in between, and why it is done that way.
How a case is decided
We decide the product, you decide the deal
You tell us how much and what for. Not which facility.
Working out whether that is a loan, a line, a bridge or something structured differently is the job you are coming to us for. So is working out where it goes, which matters more than most business owners are ever told.
Then it is your decision. We recommend and we place. What you take is yours.
Bank statements, not filed accounts
Your accounts describe a year that has already finished. You could have turned over three million last year and be in a completely different position today.
The bank account shows where the business actually is, and the last three months carry most of the weight. That is also how most lending partners underwrite, whatever their website says about accounts.
Six months, five to seven minutes from your banking app. That is the whole ask.
No figure before the evidence
Nobody can pre-approve a business without its details, a credit search, or its statements.
When one of those emails arrives telling you that you are approved for a figure, none of that has happened. The number exists to get your statements, and it moves the moment somebody actually looks.
We will tell you there looks to be potential, and why. We will not give you a figure until we have seen how the business trades. It costs us deals to work that way. Businesses handed a number elsewhere sometimes go with the number.
We place a case, we do not submit one
The same business, on the same statements, gets different answers from different lending partners.
Which one sees it, how much is asked for, and how the case is presented are all decisions, and they move the outcome as much as the numbers do. Appetite also moves. What was funded easily in March is declined in September.
Eight years of reading outcomes is what tells you where a case lands. There is no shortcut to it and it cannot be bought in.
Sometimes the answer is wait
A business that goes in now and gets declined is worse off than one that waits three months and goes in stronger. The decline sits on the file and the next attempt is harder.
If that is where the business sits, we will say so, and we will tell you what would change it.
There is no commission in that conversation, which is why almost nobody has it with you.
Nothing happens to your file without you knowing
Some checks leave no mark. Some do.
Which is which gets explained before anything runs, and a search that leaves a mark only happens once you have seen the terms and decided to go ahead.
Two questions to start. How much, and what for.
How the firm is run
Documents once, not in pieces
We build the full picture at the start, then confirm and update it.
Most brokers ask for one thing, then another, then another, and cases die somewhere in the middle of that. It is one of the most common reasons a fundable business never gets funded.
Everything you send sits in encrypted, access-controlled storage. Security and data
Bigger is not better here
The assumption is that a large brokerage has more lenders, more weight and more chance of getting it done.
What it has is more volume moving through more people. A junior analyst reads your case. It waits in a queue. It goes out to a panel rather than to the one lending partner that would have approved it. The person you spoke to first is not the person handling it by week two.
We take a limited number of cases. A brokerage that submits everything places nothing well, and its lending partners stop taking the call.
Cheap money is not the same as available money
Business owners regularly tell us they could borrow more cheaply in their own name. Usually that is an advertised rate rather than an offer, and the two are different things.
Where a personal rate genuinely is lower, it is lower because lenders hold better data on individuals than on companies, and because the debt follows the person. Commercial lending is priced against trading that moves and a company that can close. That difference is the price, not a markup.
The bigger problem is tax. Personal borrowing is repaid out of money you have already paid tax on, with no relief against corporation tax, and money moving between you and the business creates a bookkeeping trail somebody has to maintain. On a facility of any size that costs more than the rate gap saves.
Then there is scale. A personal loan will not fund a £200,000 requirement, and it is assessed on your income rather than on what the business turns over. It also sits on your personal file, and that is capacity you do not get back the next time the business needs something.
And there is purpose. Personal credit drawn and then put into the business is not personal use, and the transfer is visible in the account. More common than people think, and worth knowing before rather than after.
Where the personal route genuinely is better, we will say so. Where it is a comparison that does not hold, we will say that too.
We get paid when it completes
Not on application, not on introduction. On completion.
So you get told where the case really is, including when it is going badly, and you get a number you can call rather than an inbox.
Send six months of statements and you will know where you stand, usually the same day.