ThinCats’ outstanding loanbook breaks through £500m barrier
Alternative business lender ThinCats has said that its outstanding loanbook has surpassed £500m for the first time.
The capital currently deployed by ThinCats to support UK small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) currently stands at £508m, up from £306m in 2020, £186m in 2019 and £49m in 2018.
Last year, ThinCats achieved record lending volumes of £289m and revealed that it became profitable in the fourth quarter of the year, after its losses widened in 2019.
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“Non-bank lenders have made significant progress in recent years in providing funding to smaller businesses through online platforms and to larger businesses through direct lending funds run by large private debt asset managers,” said Amany Attia (pictured), chief executive of ThinCats.
“Medium sized SMEs have been less well served and ThinCats has been proactively filling this gap. As well as meeting a clear funding requirement, ThinCats has attracted a wide range of institutional investment, which alongside our own equity capital, has enabled us to deploy almost £700m of funding to support UK businesses since 2017.
“Over the last three years our outstanding loanbook has increased more than tenfold from £49m in April 2018 to £508m in April 2021. This means that more than £500m is currently hard at work supporting mid-sized businesses across the UK.
“Whilst it is nice to have achieved the £500m milestone, we have well-developed plans that will enable us to deploy many times this amount over the next few years in support of businesses that will drive much of the UK’s future economic growth.”
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ThinCats exited the peer-to-peer lending market in 2019 to focus on institutional funding. Its P2P business, which it rebranded as Business Loan Network, went into administration last month.