Revenue based finance provider Liberis has commissioned a poll of 1,000 SMEs which reveals that 40% of those surveyed will be actively seeking funding in 2015. And of those that will be searching for finance, whilst half will be heading straight for the bank, an encouraging 31% will be knocking on the doors of alternative lenders. Three quarters of these fund-seekers believe that they will be successful in securing finance.
The last of these findings is perhaps the most encouraging, and it ties in with the recent news that alternative business lenders are now entirely filling the gap created by declining FLS lending to small businesses. According to AltFi Data, alternative finance providers closed the £128m FLS drop off in Q3 2014 – as well as adding an extra £140m of SME funding on top. And those figures don’t even account for companies like Liberis – which are making an equally impactful contribution to bolstering SME confidence.
We’ve listed the other key findings from the One Poll survey below:
A third of small businesses won’t be applying for funding because they don’t think they’ll get it.
The top reasons for seeking funding are – in order of popularity – to pay a tax bill, to purchase new stock, to buy new equipment and for business expansion.
The most important factors at play when selecting a funding type are as follows: not wanting to use personal assets (42%), cost of finance (39%), not wanting give up equity (34%).
Paul Mildenstein, CEO of Liberis, weighed in on the results:
“It’s good to see some confidence again and a shift in the funding balance too. However, there’s still a significant number of businesses deterred from applying for funding because they don’t think they’ll get it. But the non-bank funding choice is so diverse now, there’s very likely to be a funding platform for them and we need to make sure more small businesses are aware of this.”
