News
UK B2B credit and lending news digest, 17–23 May 2026 Opening Summary The British Business Bank confirmed a £350m ENABLE Guarantee with Allica Bank, including Sona Asset Management as another investor, to unlock up to £700m of SME asset-finance lending.¹ This is the week’s clearest credit-supply
News
UK B2B Credit and Lending News Digest 10–16 May 2026 – Covering 10–16 May 2026. Summary Funding Circle’s 2025 Economic Impact Report, produced with Oxford Economics, confirmed that alternative providers and challenger banks now account for 68% of UK SME lending, making the Big Four the structural minority.
Thoughts
Checking credit risk is like checking the structural health of a bridge before sending heavy trucks across it. The bridge may still be open, but you need to know if cracks are forming, whether the load is getting heavier, and when it is time to slow down, reroute, or stop
Today we're announcing that Grand has raised $5M in funding led by 20VC, with participation from NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures) and Firedrop. This is a milestone for us, but this post isn't just about the raise. It's about the mission we set out to
Ask a credit manager how they assess a new trade account and you won't hear about one system. You'll hear about five. Maybe six. A credit report from one provider, a Companies House check in another tab, an internal spreadsheet tracking payment history, an email thread
Credit decisioning hasn't changed in 20 years. Five tabs, stale data, and days of waiting. AI is about to change that, not by replacing credit teams, but by giving them continuous intelligence, forward-looking insight, and the ability to turn every decision into a growth opportunity.
Field notes on UK business credit, monitoring, and how AI is powering better credit intelligence decisions.
For decades, commercial credit assessment has suffered from the same fundamental problem. Most decisions are made using static snapshots of businesses that are constantly changing. Financial statements are outdated by the time they are filed. Credit reports often miss operational deterioration. Manual reviews depend heavily on fragmented data, analyst interpretation,
UK B2B Credit Intelligence Digest — 3–9 May 2026 Summary The Construction Products Association cut its UK construction forecast to −2.5% for 2026, its biggest single downgrade on record, and the April construction PMI collapsed to 39.7 (from 45.6 in March). Two things to watch underneath the
There's a question that shaped everything we built over the last year. What if AI's role in credit isn't to make the decision, but to help the person making it understand what's changing before it's too late? That question led
There's an old saying in business. What gets measured gets managed. But today, UK CFOs are discovering a harder truth. What doesn't get automated gets left behind. Across British boardrooms, the pressure to adopt artificial intelligence has stopped being a strategic conversation and started being a
Risk moves off bank balance sheets — toward directors, suppliers and specialist finance — Covering 19–25 April 2026 · Published Tuesday 28 April 2026 Summary This week’s credit signal is fragmentation, not uniform tightening. Banks are still competing on mortgage pricing, while SME risk is surfacing through director guarantees, supplier payment
One thing we keep hearing from partners is just how fast we ship new stuff. We assumed, from years of building, that this was normal. It’s not. They’re used to incumbents moving in rigid cycles. A new product every few years. A feature release once a year. The
Running a company credit check once is like checking the weather the morning before a week-long sailing trip. Useful but not the same as watching the forecast every day. But most businesses are running them at the wrong moment, reading them the wrong way, and treating a single report
Good credit risk management has always depended on one thing: knowing who you're really dealing with. Bureau reports used to be the best tool for that. They're no longer enough — and the businesses that haven't noticed are absorbing losses they shouldn't be
The latest Middle East ceasefire extension is a real de-escalation signal, but for B2B lenders, it cannot yet be mistaken for a full economic reset. On April 24, 2026, Reuters reported that Israel and Lebanon had extended their ceasefire for three weeks after a White House-brokered meeting. The
How credit supply is evolving and where to pay closer attention — Covering 12–18 April 2026 · Published Monday 20 April 2026 (UK) Summary A few things caught our eye this week. Insolvency numbers are still running high — 2,022 company insolvencies in England and Wales in March 2026, with construction
A company doesn't collapse overnight. It deteriorates. Slowly at first, then all at once. The cash reserves thin out. Supplier payments start slipping by a few days, then a few weeks. The overdraft gets used more frequently. The revenue line looks fine on paper, but the money coming
Imagine you're buying a used car. It looks polished on the outside, the photos are clean, and the seller says it runs perfectly. But before handing over the money, you'd want to see the service history. And not just whether records exist — you'd want
