Member Article

New group to help small businesses seek finance

A group of finance companies have teamed up to help small businesses look beyond the banks for finance.

The Next Generation Finance Consortium (NGFC), led by MarketInvoice, aims to change the landscape of business finance in the UK.

Founding members include Crowdcube, Capital Enterprise and Angel Capital Group, who will work to provide entrepreneurs and small businesses with much needed advice and support

Following news that high street banks missed their Project Merlin lending targets, the group will also liaise with Government bodies and other organisations to lobby for support on key issues relating to small business finance.

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com is supporting the launch, and welcomed the input of the private sector in supporting high-growth early stage businesses.

He said: “When we started lastminute.com in 1998 it was very hard to find seed investors - we were lucky to find some by serendipity, directory inquiry and persistence.

“The latter will still be necessary but NGFC can help companies find finance in a more structured way.”

John Spindler, managing director of Capital Enterprise, one of the founding members of the NGFC added: “This is an exciting time for the business finance industry in the UK; the emergence of so many innovative new models has given entrepreneurs the widest choice of solutions for some time.

“The emergence of crowdfunding and peer-to-peer finance models are game-changing developments that promise to change the finance landscape forever.

“Our goal is to raise awareness of these new models to catapult them into entrepreneurs’ consciousness.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .