As usual there are a great deal of statistics that actually say very little as the 251 clients with annual turnovers in excess of £100m per annum obscure the wood quite well.
The overall number of companies using either factoring or invoice discounting has grown by the magnificent sum of 61 since the beginning of the year to 41,572 but lending to those companies has increased by £1 billion in the same period to £16 billion. Interestingly 62% of that increase in funding has come from the £10m to £50m turnover sector and 29% of the increase in the £50m to £100m turnover band.
Whilst total facility limits are shown as well as the total of advances made there is no analysis of how this is split into turnover bands and my guess is that rather than SME’s not taking their full available funding as ABFA like to claim it is actually a few of the £100m turnoevr companies that are skewing the statistics
As an example of what I meant by the large companies clouding the water there was an announcement in today’s press that NWF Group had secured a £44m invoice discounting facility with RBS.
To put this in context an SME turning over £1m would be likely to have a factoring facility of £125,000 and therefore one single facility like that of NWF equates financially to 360 SME’s turning over £1m each