The NACFB doesn’t normally worry too much about month-on-month statistics. We gather two sorts of data – daily updates on the value of deals going through our small business directory (the short-term low sample size data), and annual surveys. The annual surveys are the ones that we’re most inclined to trust because they even out the peaks and troughs along the way. Even allowing for that, this continued lending shortfall is somewhat unexpected and doesn’t mirror the reported recent activity in alternative funding.
To put a sense of scale on the £0.4 billion figure, it’s the total amount of vehicle finance reported by NACFB members, and one fifth of the value of all the commercial mortgage deals done by our members in 2013. So I’m not about to dismiss it as simply being a small percentage of the total.
At the NACFB we’re signing up new lenders, and offering them something money can’t buy – direct access to the people with the greatest influence. We recently held our “Right Finance, Right Time” drop-in event for MPs, at Portcullis House in Westminster. Anne Marie Morris MP was an excellent host and the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP was also there as keynote speaker and voluble contributor to the expert panel.
These events show how ours is a model that attracts new lenders, and they join because the NACFB now helps at every stage of funding – from the initial business enquiry, right the way up to the FCA and the MPs who decide the rules we all have to play to.
Long-time supporters of the NACFB such as Aldermore and Funding Circle, and brand new patrons like Be the Lender and CIT Vendor Finance, are a big part of the answer to the questions posed by the Bank of England. In the short term, that lending figure may have gone down, but in the longer term, we’re all here to push it back up.
