Could a trip overseas accelerate your growth plans? Export Funding is available

If you have a couple of hours to spare then The British Business Bank’s Small Business Finance Markets Report 2015-16 will certainly fill them. At 88 pages it covers most aspects of business funding and the issues facing SMEs when trying to secure some.

What is interesting is on the one hand the report confirms that the UK remains one of the strongest centres of entrepreneurial activity with a record population of 5.4 million smaller businesses but seriously lags behind others when it comes to growing them. In fact when it comes to the percentage of start-up businesses that grow to more than 10 employees after three years the UK sits near the bottom of OECD tables.

Factor in the positives  

One thing is certain; finding new markets will help a business grow and if these markets happen to be overseas then there is support and finance available to oil the wheels. And whilst the report itself doesn’t drill down to specifics, it should be made very clear that the invoice finance industry has the solutions to overcome what this research considers to be two of the biggest perceived barriers to exporting – getting paid and the time it takes to get paid.

With immediate cash advances of up to 90% against export invoices, actually getting paid for goods or services is the easy part. As for the collection of these invoices, the scope of expertise within the industry now includes multi-lingual credit control staff working across world time zones and/or the assistance of local correspondents with a wealth of local knowledge. Add bad debt protection to the mix and pretty much all the bases are covered.

Value for money

This all-encompassing support also overcomes another issue raised in the report and that is one of cost. If you cut through such jargon as “well known information asymmetries being amplified” the point being made is that export finance may be costly because the finance provider finds it more difficult to assess the potential repayment risk.

That may well be the case with traditional lending but when it comes to those invoice finance providers specialising in export funding it’s their job to assess the risk, evaluate it and provide competitively priced products on the strength of it.

As a very annoying television advertisement might say; “it’s what they do”.

by Steve Leeves