Britain's borrowing again

We took a sample of two thousand findSMEfinance.co.uk enquiries from across the first six months of 2015, and plotted the requests on a map of the UK by postcode. There's plenty of data to look at here; we continue to receive £1.4 million in leads per day, of all types and from all areas.

Related topics:  Commercial,  Commercial finance
Adam Tyler | CEO - NACFB
14th August 2015
adam tyler nacfb

You’d expect to see a large proportion of total demand around London – but even there it’s interesting to see how the north-east and south-west look a lot busier than the north-west and south-east.

A shortish way out of the capital, Birmingham is among the highlights of the statistics map. 3% of all the country’s leads come from the B postcode – rising to 4% if we combine it with the CV postcode. On the other hand, The “quiet zones” include postcodes AL (St Albans) and SP (Salisbury) are not sending many enquiries our way, and Herefordshire is also looking quiet even taking population densities into account.

Up in Scotland things look busy around Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness. But there is even more significant demand for finance down in Norfolk and Leicestershire, which is perhaps one of the surprises from the data.

The BT postcode (Northern Ireland) is chock-full of red pins; bear in mind that although that particular postcode covers a vast area, it’s not a massively populous one. There still aren’t enough funders in Northern Ireland so the Association continues to look very favourably on new lenders who will happily lend to business with a BT postcode. We’re planning to hold an event in Belfast in Quarter Four this year and we should have some good news to share with our audience when we do.

It’s not news to announce that London leads the way when it comes to loan enquiries from SMEs, but the scale of the difference between the capital (18%) and the Midlands hub (and between East and West) remains clear.

There has also been a slight increase in the number of small businesses who have independently found themselves one viable quote for a loan, and would like us to beat it. While that’s not really something we can do in practice, it shows that findSMEfinance is neither necessarily a first nor a last resort – it’s perceived instead as being one of a number of options. This suggests that businesses are getting the message – funding is out there – and regaining an initiative that was perhaps lost five or six years ago. So here’s is a shout out to business owners in Hereford and Salisbury – come and join the queue for finance, and you’ll see there really is enough to go round now!

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