4 minute read
Assetz Capital: Setting the tone
Setting the tone
Real world lending at the end of the phone
Mark Standley National Commercial Director Assetz Capital
Cast your mind back to 2011. We were still feeling the fallout of the global financial crisis and bank funding for businesses was in short supply. Couple that with the impact on deposit rates slashed to near zero by banks and building societies, it’s no wonder people were struggling to secure a fair return on their money and protect against inflation. Hard times!
There’s always a light-bulb moment behind every great idea – and it was no different for us. With Chris Mellish – now chief technology officer, our head of property David Penston, and chief executive officer Stuart Law, we brought together our collective experience and industry knowledge to not only address the imbalanced grip of the more traditional banks, but to offer a simple and fair way for SMEs who often struggled to access finance to borrow through our marketplace. So came Assetz Capital in 2013.
Through our development finance, commercial mortgages and bridging finance, we’ve pioneered ‘real world lending’ to meet the needs of modern brokers who increasingly want to drive potential growth for their clients and make a positive impact on the world around them.
Leading the way
To date, we’ve lent over £1.5 billion – and are targeting record levels of lending in 2022. In the last couple of years, we’ve funded the building of around one in every 12 new homes built by SME housebuilders in the UK and supported many other types of businesses from manufacturers to care homes and wholesalers to hotels, all driven through our nationwide team of regional relationship directors – technical and highly experienced finance professionals.
Our journey so far has been an exciting one, with our first big milestone coming just one year after launch, as we hit the £50 million mark for loans facilitated to UK SMEs. We’ve crowdfunded successfully, won awards, achieved a five-star rating from Defaqto and have successfully lent to over 1,100 businesses.
Change is constant in the lending market. Two years ago, we all found ourselves in the middle of another far-reaching crisis, this time with the COVID-19 pandemic. With the initial lockdown introduced as a first response – which led to an immediate and severe liquidity crisis – then the tiered-system and local restrictions further down
the line, the pandemic impacted regional businesses in different ways. We were initially approved for accreditation as a lender under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) by the British Business Bank, which preceded the Recovery Loan Scheme – both reactive government-backed loan schemes to help the economy through COVID-19.
Real world lending
To apply for a loan, all we ask brokers to do is to give us a call to discuss their client’s requirements. Assetz Capital has been and always will be a relationship business, so it seems logical that one of our relationship directors will set up a face-to-face meeting and get to know the borrower properly and work to design the optimum funding solution to meet their needs.
Our relationship directors are supported by two highly experienced teams; a time-served credit team and a dedicated relationship support team. Between them they look to apply real-world, common-sense principles alongside financial metrics. The customer sets the timelines, not us, and with a strong support team behind them the relationship director will ensure efficient and timely delivery as required with regular communication through the process.
A comprehensive intermediary product guide is updated monthly on our website and emailed directly to brokers to provide just a flavour of what we can do – a diverse range of property secured loan solutions for business. Minimum contribution and high LTV, yes, we can do that. Larger borrower contribution and finer interest rates, yes, we have that covered as well.
Looking forward
We’ve always believed that financial success and making a positive social impact are closely linked, a view we share with an increasing majority of brokers. We’re laser-focused on safely growing Assetz Capital this year to provide even more attractive opportunities for property developers and housebuilders, to support the growth of UK trading businesses and job creation and provide increasing numbers of energy efficient homes to those that need them most. Large numbers of our intermediary partners see Assetz as the ‘go-to’ lender for SMEs and it’s our real-world lending approach that we will continue to deliver that solidifies that position.
