Banks Refuse Millions in Credit for East Anglian SMEs

• Alternative lenders have provided up to £169 million in funding to the region’s businesses
• GDP of East Anglia and Essex is estimated to be bigger than the GDP of Serbia, Croatia, Jordan and Jamaica

New analysis⁽¹⁾ from the alternative SME lender Fleximize, which is headquartered in Ipswich, reveals that there are over 150,000 businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE in East Anglia and Essex, making up around one in twenty of the total number in the UK.

However, Fleximize estimates that this year around £25.51 million of credit applications from SMEs in East Anglia and Essex have been rejected every month by the banks⁽²⁾, but since 2008 the alternative finance sector has lent around £169.14 million to businesses in the region⁽³⁾.

Region	Estimated number of VAT and/or PAYE registered enterprises	Estimated value of credit applications made by businesses in this region that were rejected between January and June 2015	Estimated value of money lent to businesses in the region by alternative finance companies
Essex	59,600	£59.83 million	£66.11 million
Norfolk	31,600	£31.73 million	£35.06 million
Suffolk	28,200	£28.31 million	£31.28 million
Cambridgeshire	27,200	£27.28 million	£30.14 million
City of Peterborough	5,900	£5.93 million	£6.55 million
Total	152,400	£153.08 million	£169.14 million

Max Chmyshuk, Founder and Managing Partner at Fleximize, said: “East Anglia and Essex is a hive of business activity, and we estimate its GDP is around £172.89 billion a year, which is bigger than countries such as Croatia, Serbia, Jordan and Jamaica⁽⁴⁾.

“However, like any thriving economy, it needs access to credit to grow and our research also suggests that many financially viable SMEs in East Anglia and Essex are being turned down for finance because they do not fit the often inflexible criteria applied by many banks. At Fleximize, we use more in-depth analysis of a company’s financial performance and its customer feedback on online trading platforms such as Amazon and eBay to determine whether or not we will lend. This has meant that we have lent to a number of financially viable companies which have previously been rejected by the banks.”

Fleximize’s analysis reveals that 15.8% of the business enterprises in the region are in the professional, scientific and technical sectors, and this is followed by 14.5% in construction. The third biggest sector is business administration and support services, which account for 7.6% of enterprises in the region ⁽¹⁾.

Fleximize offers a choice of flexible loans and revenue-based financing to small and medium-sized businesses where repayments are tied to a client’s revenue flow – paying back more in good months and less when income drops. In the first half of this year, the amount it lent was over 200% higher than in the same period in 2014.

For further information visit fleximize.com or call 020 7100 0110. It has also produced a free guide to alternative finance for SMEs, which can be downloaded by clicking here.

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Notes to editors

• Fleximize analysis of ONS data
• Fleximize analysis of British Bankers Association (BBA) data
• Fleximize analysis of ONS, BBA and Alt Fin data
• Fleximize analysis of ONS data and Wikipedia