Thincats and Paragon Bank in new wave of lenders added to coronavirus loans panel

This morning four additional lenders were added to the government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), taking the total to 52.

Among the newly added were a host of alternative lenders including ThinCats, Paragon Bank and invoice financing platform IGF.

The move comes amid criticism that the £330bn CBILS is failing to deliver funding to the businesses that need it, last week it was announced that just over 16,600 loans had been awarded under the scheme amounting to £2.8bn in cash lent.

While CBILS started out with just 40 lenders, mostly traditional banks, growing numbers of alternative lenders like Funding Circle, Starling Bank, OakNorth and now ThinCats and Paragon have been added.

ThinCats managing director Ravi Anand said the commercial lender was delighted to have been added to the scheme, but said his focus would be on existing borrowers for the time being.

“Our initial focus will be on those businesses that we know the best and can therefore help most quickly, which are existing ThinCats borrowers,” said Anand.

The British Business Bank, which oversees the CBILS, said it continues to accelerate the pace at which new lenders are being onboarded and is looking for all kinds of lenders to take part.

“The Bank continues to review applications from a wide range of lender types – from PRA-regulated banks, to platform lenders, debt funds, invoice finance lenders, asset finance lenders and responsible finance lenders,” wrote the British Business Bank.

At the start of the month a new offshoot to the CBILS was announced to cover larger businesses which need loans in excess of £5m, known as the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS).

Today it was announced that 10 lenders have been added to CLBILS to offer lending of up to £50m, including Barclays,HSBC,RBS,NatWest, Santander and Lloyds Bank.