From £5,000 to £10m, secured or unsecured. One profile puts your business in front of mainstream banks and alternative lenders at the same time, so you compare real offers instead of applying to them one at a time.
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An unsecured loan is lent against your trading record. There is no charge over an asset, so it is quicker to arrange and you are not risking property, but the lender is carrying more risk and prices accordingly: rates are higher, terms are shorter and the sums available are smaller. Most unsecured lenders will also want a personal guarantee from a director, which is worth understanding properly — it is not the same as security over an asset, but it does mean the debt can follow you if the company cannot pay.
A secured loan is lent against something — commercial property, equipment, sometimes a debenture over the business. Because the lender can recover, the money is cheaper, the term is longer and the ceiling is far higher. What you trade for that is time: valuations and legal work take weeks, not days. If you need money this month, secured lending is usually the wrong tool no matter how good the rate looks.
The practical answer is often neither purely one nor the other. A business that needs £40,000 next week and £300,000 next year is looking at two different products with two different conversations, and treating it as one requirement is how owners end up with an expensive short-term facility doing a long-term job.
Affordability first. Not whether you are profitable on paper, but whether the bank statements show enough consistent surplus to service the repayment alongside everything else already going out. This is why management figures matter more than last year's filed accounts — filed accounts can be nine months out of date, and a lender pricing risk today wants to see today.
Then stability. Length of trading, whether turnover is growing or falling, how concentrated your income is across customers, and whether the account runs into unarranged overdraft. A single large customer is a strength commercially and a risk to a lender, and it is one of the commonest reasons a healthy business gets a smaller offer than it expected.
Credit history matters, but less bluntly than people assume, and differently between lenders. That is the whole argument for comparing rather than applying: the same business can be declined by one lender and approved by another on the same figures, because they are not weighting the same things.
Two loans quoted at the same rate can cost very different amounts. What moves the total is the term, the fee structure and how interest is charged — a longer term lowers the monthly payment and raises the total, and a fixed fee on a short facility can dwarf the interest.
Ask for the total amount repayable, in pounds, over the full term, and compare that. Then ask separately about arrangement fees, drawdown fees, early-repayment charges and any broker fee. A deal that looks cheap monthly and expensive in total is not a bargain; it is a longer loan.
Your Found Funding profile is matched against Swoop's panel of banks, alternative lenders, equity funds and grant agencies — one search instead of one application at a time.
Typically from £5,000 up to £10m, depending on turnover, trading history and whether you can offer security. As a rough guide, unsecured lenders tend to cap at somewhere between one month's turnover and 25% of annual turnover — so a business turning over £600,000 might see £50,000 to £150,000 unsecured. Secured lending goes considerably further because the lender can recover against the asset. What actually sets the number is affordability: whether your bank statements show consistent surplus enough to service the repayment alongside everything already going out. That is why management figures matter more than filed accounts, which can be nine months out of date by the time a lender reads them.
No, and this is where comparing matters most. Mainstream banks weight credit history heavily; alternative lenders look at the whole picture — trading history, turnover, affordability and the direction the business is heading. A past blip does not rule you out, it changes which lenders fit. The same business, on the same figures, is routinely declined by one lender and approved by another because they are not weighting the same things. What does real damage is applying everywhere at once: multiple hard searches in a short window are visible to later lenders and read as distress, so a filtered approach beats a scattergun one.
Some unsecured lenders pay out within 24 to 48 hours of approval, and a few same-day where the paperwork is clean. Secured products take considerably longer — valuations, legal work and searches are involved, and several weeks is normal rather than exceptional. The single biggest determinant is not the lender, it is you: applications stall because information arrives in pieces over three weeks, and a stalled application frequently becomes a declined one because the file goes cold. Having accounts, management figures, bank statements and details of existing borrowing ready before you start typically halves the elapsed time.
It takes a few minutes to see what your business is eligible for. Free, impartial, no pressure.
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