Capitalise experienced a surge in funding enquiries on the platform last week, in particular for CBILS facilities. As the summer holidays ended, more businesses had taken steps to assess their longer term financing requirements, but time was rapidly running out for them before the deadline of 30th September.
Therefore, we welcome the Chancellor’s announcement that he will extend the Government backed loan schemes to 30th November 2020 for businesses to make their applications to lenders.
In addition, the CBILS and Bounce back loans can now be extended to a 10 year repayment term and if businesses are struggling to repay their bounce back loans, they can opt for interest only repayments or, in critical situations, suspend all repayments for up to six months.
These loans already provided very attractive terms and this move has allowed cashflow within businesses to be supported even more. The Chancellor did state that a successor guarantee loan programme was being developed for applications from 1st January, but we believe these terms are unlikely to be repeated for most businesses in the open market, once the schemes end.
Refined underwriting process for CBILS
More lenders have begun to accept CBILS applications over the past few months and their increased experience has allowed them to refine their underwriting processes. This larger marketplace provides us with a greater opportunity to use our platform to connect businesses to the most appropriate lenders and we are now regularly seeing accountants receive offers for their clients within days.
As the market has become more efficient and businesses have become more confident to assess their future requirements, it would have been short-sighted to close the scheme so soon.
