High street banks’ SME lending comeback won’t rattle challengers June 20, 2025 High street banks are flocking back to small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending but face a battle against fintechs which have captured their spot. The Big Four banks have shed their market stronghold in SME lending. Research from the British Business Bank in March revealed challenger banks make up around 60 per cent of gross [...]
Simply: Fintech SME lender expands loan book as firms turn to debt finance June 17, 2025 Simply Asset Finance notched a record loan total in the last year as firms turned to debt financing to fuel their expansion plans. The UK lender to small- and medium-sized enterprises topped £1.75bn in the total cumulative value of all loans they’ve approved and funded after the firm’s loan book expanded by £505m over 2024. [...]
High street banks ramp up SME lending to highest since 2022 June 16, 2025 High street banks are scaling up their lending to small businesses, with the first quarter of 2022 hitting the highest amount since 2022. Lenders issued £4.6bn worth of loans in the first three months of the year marking a 14 per cent year-on-year jump. The rise was driven by a surge of lending to agriculture, [...]
Was Reeves’ Spending Review a fintech endorsement? June 14, 2025 Rachel Reeves has promised to back UK fintech and in Labour’s inaugural Spending Review, she piled billions into the tech sector. The Chancellor handed the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) a hefty £16.5bn budget as she took the chop to other departments. DSIT’s expenditure limit is set to grow 7.4 per cent by [...]
Will fintech banks survive falling interest rates? June 13, 2025 Fintech lenders have accelerated their swing to profitability after interest rates spiked. The UK’s neobanks pocketed record revenues in the last 12 months. Revolut’s takings grew 72 per cent topping £3.1bn. Meanwhile Monzo’s revenue hit £1bn for the first time. But this came as interest rates maintained a post-financial crisis high of 5.25 per cent [...]
‘I accidentally locked one of the world’s richest men in a car park’: Symmie Swil on her career at Starling and Upvest June 12, 2025 Working at Starling, meetings with pandas, and accidentally locking one of the richest men in the world in a car park. Upvest's Symmie Swil takes us through her career.
London Tech Week day 2: Tech diplomacy in action June 10, 2025 Day 2 of London Tech Week made it clear our global influence grows through emerging markets, writes Russ Shaw.
FCA boss: Buy now, pay later regulation is a trade off June 10, 2025 The chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the new clamp down on buy now, pay later (BNPL) regulation would be a “trade off” as he faced a grilling from MPs. Nikhil Rathi, who was reappointed as the regulator’s boss in April, told the Treasury Committee the crackdown would have “beneficiaries and downside [...]
Ouch: Three tech firms bail out of the UK in a single day June 10, 2025 The Prime Minister did his best to sound bullish about the future of the UK tech sector yesterday as he opened London Tech Week. Some awkward technical issues with his autocue didn’t put him off his stride as he declared that Britain was “unequivocally, unashamedly and defiantly open for business.” Leaving aside the bizarre idea [...]
Klarna boss: AI will lead to recession and mass job losses June 7, 2025 The introduction of AI at firms could lead to a recession due to mass job losses of professionals, Klarna’s chief executive has warned. The use of AI to make work more efficient has been encouraged by leading figures, including the government itself which said it could save civil servants two weeks a year. But fintech [...]