People ask me why I started another lender. There are plenty already, and short-term business lending has a reputation that is not always kind. The honest answer is that I kept meeting good companies, run by capable directors, who could not get a small amount of money quickly without being asked to put their home or their family’s security on the line. That bothered me, and I thought it could be done differently. So in November 2024 we began trading, and this is what we set out to do.
Speaking as Credicorp’s founder and managing director, this is a personal note about how we lend. I want to be straight with you from the start, because that is the whole point of the business. We are small, we are new, and we are still learning. What follows is not a sales pitch. It is the thinking behind what we built.
Understand the business first
Most lending decisions start with a person’s history and work backwards. We try to do the opposite. When a company applies to us, the first thing we want to understand is the business itself: what it does, how money comes in, whether the next few weeks look manageable. A late-paying customer, a quiet trading month, a one-off bill that lands at the wrong time. These are the ordinary realities of running a company, and a number on a personal file rarely tells you much about them.
That does not mean we ignore risk. We run a business credit check on the company, and we carry out an identity check on the director, because lending responsibly means doing the work. But we are looking at the company’s position, not judging a director by a past that may have nothing to do with how their business trades today.
Look beyond credit history
A thin or bruised credit history is not the same as a bad business. I have seen companies turned away because of something years old, or because they are simply too young to have built up a long record. A short, well-run trading history and a clear sense of how a small loan would be repaid can tell you far more than a score on its own. We try to read the whole picture rather than stop at the first red mark.
I should be plain about something else. The kind of borrowing we offer is expensive compared with a bank overdraft or a longer-term facility, because it is small, short and fast. It suits a specific job: bridging a genuine, short-lived gap. It is the wrong tool for a long-term shortfall, and part of doing this properly is saying so. You can see exactly what is currently offered, and the figures, on our business loans page, and every cost is set out on your Key Information Sheet (KIS) before you sign anything.
Lend to the company, not the person
This is the part I care about most. We lend to the company, the body corporate, for business purposes, and we do not take a personal guarantee from its director. If a company we have lent to runs into serious trouble, the director does not lose their house over it. That is a deliberate choice, and it shapes everything: who we lend to, how we assess affordability, and how we behave when things go wrong.
It also means we sit outside the consumer-credit rules that protect individuals, because a company is not an individual under Article 60B FSMA RAO 2001. So this lending is not covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service or the FSCS. I would rather you know that now than discover it later. We try to make up for it by being clear, fair and easy to reach, and by running a proper complaints process of our own.
A small, new lender, trying to do it well
I am not going to pretend we are something we are not. We are a young company, and we will make mistakes. What I can promise is that we will be honest about our costs, careful about who we lend to, and genuinely helpful when a company is struggling. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do is say no, and we will. If you want to know more about who we are and how we came to be, our about us page tells the story, and our wider Newsroom is where I will keep writing honestly about how we work. That openness is the company I wanted to build.
