Last week the platform announced a partnership with a West Midlands-focused co-operative business loan fund by the name of BCRS Business Loans – whereby the latter committed to investing in local businesses via the ThinCats platform. Upon covering this news, we suggested that ThinCats would doubtless be on the hunt to secure further institutional investment agreements. But we didn’t expect the next announcement to come quite so soon.
Nor did we anticipate the scale of the platform’s next tie-up. ThinCats has now struck a deal with ESO Capital Group. The deal involves the underwriting of a regular series of larger deals originated via the ThinCats platform. ESO – a European special situations investment management group – will initially deploy between £20m and £50m through the platform, but both sides of arrangement reportedly expect this figure to rise substantially over the coming years.
Kevin Caley, CEO of ThinCats – who has long lobbied for third-party, institutional investment, weighed in:
“We are delighted to be partnering with ESO. As a specialist in large, secured loans we are confident that ESO’s underwriting commitment will help us further strengthen our position as one of the leading players in the sector. This partnership will also allow us to facilitate further lending to UK SMEs as well as driving increased liquidity and opportunities to our thousands of lenders. We believe that ESO’s choice of ThinCats gives a strong validation to our model and commitment to all stakeholders who benefit from our platform.”
ThinCats recently faced an unusual situation whereby the platform was fielding a greater number of quality borrower requests than its private investor base could satisfy. The ESO underwriting deal should henceforth allow the platform to maintain a consistently stable balance of supply and demand.
The arrangement also opens up the possibility of a series of larger ticket loans being facilitated via the platform. ThinCats has already funded loans of over £2m in size, but ESO’s involvement will supposedly enable loans of up to £5m to be funded.
