Unsecured Business Loans

Ben Larkins and Jon Maloney are back to answer people’s frequently asked questions about getting a £100,000 loan.

Can I get a £100,000 business loan?

At Century Business Finance we only deal with businesses. So if an individual’s listening and they’re looking to get a loan, speak to your bank – we don’t do it.

To get you a £100,000 business loan we just need you to apply on our website. Go through the application, send us your financial information and we can have a look at it.

What should I do before I apply for a £100,000 loan? Can I prepare anything in advance?

Typically, for any sort of loan we need the last six months’ business bank statements and the last full set of year end accounts. Not the abbreviated ones that you find on Companies House – we need the full set. That’s always good practice, if you get those downloaded.

With a lot of banks you can just press a button on your internet banking and it delivers a PDF of your statements to your computer. So if you can get those downloaded and send them off, we can get working on it straight away for you.

Can I borrow a £100,000 business loan with bad credit? What sort of credit score is needed for this loan?

The lending can depend on the severity of the bad credit. If you’ve had loans in the past, or you’re currently in arrears on other loans or mortgages, or you’ve got CCJs that are unsettled, probably not. That’s likely to be too severe.

However, if it’s a case of some historic missed payments and a couple of blips along the way, most businesses have those. Everybody has unexpected events, so you can still get a loan with a couple of small issues on your files.

People often don’t realise that if they have missed a couple of payments here and there over the last two years, it doesn’t mean you have bad credit. We could still look at getting you a loan.

How long does the application process take? How do I apply for a £100,000 loan?

Looking to borrow £100,000 it’s slightly more difficult than if you were looking to borrow £50,000, for example. On lower value products, you can often get an auto decision.

At this level, a bit more goes into it on the back end, with an underwriter looking at it. It’s not an insignificant amount of money that you’re looking to borrow. They’re going to look at whether your business can afford it and what you want the money for.

Typically, you’re looking at between two and three days for the process with this value of loan.

How long are the repayment terms?

Every one of our loans is between 12 months and five years.

Can I pay off a £100,000 loan early?

Yes, but it depends which lender it’s with. Some lenders will charge you the full term of interest. If you’ve taken £100,000 over three years and pay it back after six months, you’ll essentially have to pay back all the monthly payments you would have made over three years.

But many other lenders will only charge interest up to the point of settlement, so you essentially only pay interest on the money that you have used.

So, you can settle early, but perhaps give us a call before you do to find out the particular lender’s criteria. It’s on all the documents when you sign up, but just for your peace of mind

give us a call and we’ll soon tell you what the criteria are.

If it’s an important aspect of the loan to potentially settle early, make that abundantly clear early on in the application, so we can put you to the right funder for your requirement. If you have a big tranche of money coming in and we put you with a funder where you can’t settle early, you’re locked in. So it’s important to let us know and be as transparent as possible upfront, and we can place you correctly.

What happens if I miss a payment?

You will probably get a phone call from the funder in the first instance and they will notify us as well. We’ll try and get in contact with you.

The first call is always a very friendly one, to see if there’s a problem and if you need any help. It might be a temporary cash flow problem, in which case we might be able to help by topping up the loan.

The worst thing anybody can do if they miss a payment is to ignore the phone call and any emails. If you do that, it gets worse very quickly. If you bury your head in the sand and think that the problem will go away, it won’t.

Nine times out of 10 it’s just a temporary problem. These funders aren’t unreasonable. They’re not going to knock on your door or arrange a court summons after one missed payment. They’re very commercially minded – they want their money, but they also recognise that things go wrong in a business every single day.

You might have had a massive leak or a large bill that’s come out of nowhere. As long as you communicate with them they’ll look to work with you. When businesses go bust, they are the ones that ignored the phone calls and emails, and the problem just got bigger and bigger. If they had answered the phone or email at the outset we probably could have helped them.

Communication is key – there’s no harm in phoning us or your funder if you have a payment due on Friday but that money won’t come in until next week. Just call them up. They’re not unreasonable people.