Posted: Wednesday, 6 December 2023 @ 12:18
It’s been nearly two years since we launched our incubator block discounting at Rivers, providing new and small lenders with the funding lines they need to grow in the market. Despite the wider economic challenges of the intervening period, we can now see it’s achieving the long-term impact that we hoped for, not only delivering success for Rivers, but to our customers as well.
Enabling growth
The Rivers incubator block line came about because we saw a barrier in the market, where smaller lenders could not access the level of funding they needed in order to scale their portfolio. Nurturing these smaller businesses is essential to the finance industry as a whole and history shows that some of them will become the big players of the future.
For many smaller funders and brokers running their own book, Rivers has been the first lender to help them with their processes and operations. This has enabled them to grow their own books to a point where they can then go on to access additional block lines from banks and larger finance houses, that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to obtain.
Part of a financial ecosystem
Two years on, and we're seeing our hypothesis turn into a reality. Our goal was to give people the opportunity to get into the market and to not only be suitable clients for our block lending service, but to progress to the levels of funding that come next.
Today, customers who couldn’t get support before working with us, have credit lines from three or four different, larger lenders. It's fantastic to see that we’ve filled a space at the lower end of the spectrum, allowing parties to come together and facilitate individual as well as collective growth.
A launchpad for smaller lenders
As a business ourselves we know we can’t bridge the gap in the market entirely. However, our presence gives many a launchpad on which to gain confidence and traction until they can eventually become a fully funded business, which is where we all want to be. One of our earliest customers, who started with us at £250,000, now has several million in funding that he wouldn't have otherwise been able to access.
As things stand, we're still unique in the marketplace and demand is high. As a result, our own growth is ahead of where we thought we might be at this point, and we continue to receive regular requests and introductions across the UK.
Our Head of Block Discounting, Peter Jamison, says: "The question that we're most frequently asked is 'what makes Rivers different?'. It's specifically because we are the only ones doing block lending at this end of the market, supporting early stage businesses. What we are now seeing is real evidence within our portfolio of customers that people who started to work with us a year ago or more, did so because they could not find an alternative. They are now beginning to get onto the radar of bigger, more established players, who are granting them additional credit lines on the back of what we offered them. That's a wonderful outcome."
Find out more about Rivers Incubator Block Discounting