Starling adds Growth Street to marketplace

Starling has added small business lender Growth Street to its marketplace of firms connected through the digital bank’s platform. 

The London-based peer-to-peer firm offers loans of between £25,000 and £2m to small businesses. Growth Street’s flagship product is GrowthLine, which works much like an overdraft, with small businesses given a limit, they can draw down on and make repayments as often as they like, within agreed limits.

Starling’s marketplace already covers several partners ranging from Direct Line insurance to online mortgage broker Habito. It allows data to be shared securely with other organisations, giving customers access to a suite of financial products to help them manage their money.

Growth Street lends small firms who find their cashflow squeezed up to 85 per cent of the value of a customer’s invoices, up to 35 per cent of work in progress, or up to 35 per cent of the value of a company’s stock.  

New lenders

“A new generation of lenders such a Growth Street are providing access to flexible forms of credit, to help businesses deliver on their growth plans,” said Starling as it introduced the peer-to-peer lender in a blog yesterday.

Earlier this week, Starling, launched in 2014, said it has around 770,000 account holders, and expects to top one million customers by the end of the year. It holds £600m in deposits, and estimates it will pass £1bn of customer deposits by the end of 2019.

Starling, led by chief executive Anne Boden (pictured), competes against other UK and European fintech banks such as Revolut, Monzo and N26.

Last month, Growth Street said it had originated more than £500m of loans since the business lending platform was launched five years ago. The firm, led by co-founder and chief executive Greg Carter, currently has around 2,500 investors, who are a mixture of institutional and individual backers.