Imagine you’re Will, now five years into your small business, manufacturing quality PVC doors. You’re profitable, you have ten employees, and you’ve had an extraordinarily busy run-up to Christmas, with a welcome glut of customer orders coming in. That’s involved a significant uptick in costs, with additional expenditure on materials and labour. But you have a dilemma: the doors are ready to be fitted, but customers haven’t paid yet and you have VAT, wage bills and workspace rental all due before a single penny of customer money arrives in your business account.
This is a predicament many small business owners find themselves facing. The fact is that smaller companies have a tougher time managing cash flow than their giant counterparts in the corporate jungle. And no one wants to turn down business (and the enhanced reputation it can promote), even if they have to temporarily spend before they can see any profit.
Our door manufacturer, Will, could, of course, be any small business owner. Like many of them, he’d developed a mistrust of the banks after having been declined for a business overdraft a couple of years ago – a refusal that he knew would reflect negatively on his credit rating. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t keen on borrowing from that source of credit again any time soon.
Knowing that he’d shortly have ample funds to cover his costs wasn’t much of a consolation in the here and now: there were bills that had to be paid pronto, and precious little in the way of funds to meet these obligations.
As he was seeking a solution on the trusty web, Will explored peer-to-peer lender options as an alternative to the banks. However, he was disheartened to find that most of these players in the alternative finance space still required a suitable credit history, which he knew he’d be unable to provide; and he didn’t relish the prospect of another credit search that culminated in a refusal.
If he’d done just a little more homework, however, he might have discovered peer-to-peer lender Unbolted. With its unique secured asset loan offerings, Unbolted’s pool of lenders simply aren’t interested in a borrower’s creditworthiness. As long as the applicant has a valuable asset they can offer as collateral for the borrowing, money can usually be transferred into the borrower’s bank account within hours of the possession arriving at the platform’s offices.
The definition of “asset” as used by Unbolted is wide-ranging: the platform will accept anything from gold and silver bullion, jewellery, classic cars, musical instruments, luxury handbags, luxury watches, fine wines, fine art and even classic manuscripts and rare books. Plenty of people find themselves temporarily cash poor, without realising that they often have the cash they need tied up in a high-value possession. Unbolted “unbolts” that cash: its expert partners will determine the value of the possession upon resale in a secondary market, whereupon it can be used as security for the loan.
If the borrower can’t settle when the loan matures (usually in six months), the deal is that Unbolted will arrange for the asset they’ve been safely storing to be sold at auction. However, Unbolted’s borrowers can also settle earlier than the maximum term without penalty.
