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Since the launch of the first Peer to Peer and Equity Crowdfunding platforms, alternative finance has not only been providing new options for businesses seeking capital, it has also been redefining the web of relationships that link companies, investors and intermediaries. In broad terms, the various platforms that have emerged over the past five…
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Marketplace lending is now an established segment of the UK’s business finance ecosystem, but until relatively recently it has perhaps been considered as an ‘alternative’ solution – something that sits outside the mainstream. It’s a perception that may be changing, as debt platforms take an increasingly large share of the SME lending market. …
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Surprising as it may seem, reality TV show, Dragon’s Den has been gracing UK screens for around twelve years. Individual dragons have come and gone, but the format remains largely unchanged, with presenter Evan Davis providing an additional sense of continuity. Although it is…
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The concept of multiple funding rounds is familiar to most business owners – and particularly to those entrepreneurs who are focused on steering their companies on a growth path that runs from ‘startup’ to ‘scale-up’. The classic funding escalator runs from seed funding – which might be sourced from angels, VCs, an accelerator, a government…
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‘Peer-to-peer lending’. These days it’s a term that is familiar to just about everyone with an interest in SME finance. Widely covered in the press and now broadly recognised by brokers and advisers as an option that should be considered when businesses need to borrow, Peer-to-Peer debt solutions are, arguably, no longer ‘alternative’ but part…
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The generation of innovative alternative finance platforms that have emerged in the UK since the start of the decade are a product of a much wider digital revolution that has changed the relationship between providers and customers in just about every sector. And given that one of the key trends in the digital transformation of…
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The growing popularity and availability of ‘alternative finance’ has been one of the big business stories of the last five years or so. The expansion of the Alternative Finance universe isn’t surprising. The great financial crisis swept away many of the comfortable ‘certainties’ of the funding marketplace. Prior to the meltdown in the global banking…
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In a corporate finance universe in which all other factors were equal, a business in search of, say, £40,000 would naturally gravitate to the cheapest provider of capital. After all, money is money, so why pay higher interest rates or hand over more equity than is strictly necessary? But in the real world, a business…
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Nature abhors a vacuum, so when bank lending slowed to a trickle in the wake of the global financial crisis, it was almost inevitable that new forms of business funding would emerge to address demand from SMEs for growth and working capital. In the short term, asset backed lenders – the alternative financiers of their…
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For those in the know, alternative finance has been one of the big stories of the past five years. On the principle that even the darkest and most turbulent clouds somewhere conceal a silver lining, the financial crisis of the late 2000s paved the way for a wave of innovation that saw the arrival of…
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