We fund most sectors. In these we know how the money moves.
Sector knowledge is not marketing. It decides where a case goes. A lending institution that does not understand how a business is structured reads its accounts wrong and declines it, and a broker who does not understand the business sends it there anyway.
- Automotive
Our largest sector by volume. Stocking finance, forecourt cycles, and why a dealership’s balance sheet reads far worse than the business behind it.
- Logistics
Fuel daily, drivers weekly, customers on 42 days. The gap is the business.
- Retail
Supermarkets, restaurants and e-commerce. Stock costs money before it earns any.
- Construction
The worst payment record of any sector in the UK, and none of it is the contractor’s fault.
Which sectors get funded
Almost all of them. The market talks about high risk and low risk industries as though it is a list, and it is not. It is three groups.
Not placed
Gambling and adult entertainment, along with a small number of others. Most of that is reputation, not regulation. Lending partners do not want their name attached, whatever the numbers look like.
Crypto sits here too, and for a different reason. It is not a judgement on the business. No lending partner we work with currently has appetite for the sector, so there is nowhere to place it. Telling you that now saves you the enquiry.
Underwritten more cautiously
Hospitality, and businesses with heavy refund exposure or volatile revenue. These are funded regularly. They are priced differently, fewer partners will look at them, and which one sees the case matters more than it does elsewhere.
A cautiously viewed sector raises the bar. It rarely closes the door.
Everything else
Assessed on the business, not the sector. What the account shows, what is already being serviced, and whether the trading supports what is being asked for.
The thing that declines businesses for no reason
Your SIC code.
Every UK limited company carries a Standard Industrial Classification code, chosen at incorporation and confirmed on every confirmation statement. Most business owners have not looked at theirs in years.
Lending partners read it. Automated decisioning reads it first. If the code on file does not describe what the business actually does, a perfectly fundable business gets declined by a system that never looked at the account.
Around 740,000 UK companies sit under catch-all codes that say almost nothing about their activity. Others are simply wrong, and some are actively harmful. Women’s health businesses have been flagged as adult content and treated as high risk because the classification system has no provision for what they do.
We check this before anything is submitted. If the code is the problem, that is usually fixable, and it is worth fixing before an application rather than after a decline.
Send six months of statements and you will know where you stand, usually the same day.