Posted: Tuesday, 7 December 2021 @ 10:42
When Rivers Leasing started in 2011, we were supported early on by block funders who offered relatively small facilities. Now that our company has developed, we want to do the same for other SMEs and starts-ups by introducing our new incubator block discounting service.
A gap in the market
At Rivers, our first ever facility was only around £50,000, a relatively small amount by the standards of most block funders, but today we have funding lines in excess of £40m.
Accessing low levels of finance isn’t easy and there’s long been a vacuum in that end of the market as far as block discounting is concerned. Most companies offering the service restrict their activities to offering only substantial facilities, which also means that their target audience is restricted to established businesses with significant balance sheets.
If you're a relative newcomer to the market or are a smaller lender, it’s more difficult to break through and this creates a barrier to scaling up your portfolio. Nurturing these smaller businesses is essential to the finance industry as a whole and history shows that some of them will become the big players of the future. After all, if there are no newcomers in the market, then there won’t be anyone seeking to access those bigger sums down the line.
Funding lines for small lenders
With all of this in mind, we have developed our block discounting service specifically to incubate young businesses, allowing new independent lenders to access sufficient funding to grow their businesses in a controlled manner, until they are in a position to approach larger lenders for more wholesale funding.
We will initially be offering Block Discounting lines of up to £250,000, which is all but unique in the market. We will be making lines available subject to appropriate due diligence in line with our normal high standards, both as standalone facilities and, in some cases, as a top-up facility where other lenders are already in place.
Slow and steady growth
As is in the Rivers’ nature, we are intentionally approaching our incubator block discounting facilities slowly and steadily. Limited availability and access to start with and mindful that we want to manage the process in a manner that preserves our core values - dependability, due diligence, and security for all stakeholders. Over time, following this approach has allowed us to grow without reducing the quality of our service and put us in an excellent position to grow further over the coming months and years.
We like to keep a focus on developing our business, moving it forward through carefully planned organic growth. That means we can deliver on the promises we make to all those involved with us – our clients, our shareholders, the industry we represent, our brokers, and of course our team.
Ratan Daryani, Managing Director of Rivers Leasing said: “At Rivers we are passionate about helping British SMEs to develop. That’s in part because they are our clients, partly because they are the bedrock of the UK economy, and partly because we ourselves are an SME. Capital is essential for any business to develop, and we have been able to grow because we had the initial access to the level of funding that we needed. Incubator block discounting is something we have been wanting to offer for a while - now is the right time. It’s been planned and carefully developed with the specific goal of filling the gap where businesses are too small to go to the much bigger lenders. We’re here to help them develop enough to go to that next level.”
If you would like to discuss incubator block discounting services with the team, please contact Rivers Leasing.
CONTACT RIVERS LEASING