From the Companies House charge register

Invoice finance lender tracker: Who is actually funding UK business?

Every invoice finance and asset-based lending facility leaves a trace: a floating charge over all assets, registered at Companies House. We read all 3.5 million charge records and counted them by lender.

Updated 2026-09-16 · 39,585 matched charge records

Live facilities

39,585

held by identified providers

New in 2025

5,764

+28% against 2019

Typical facility life

3.9 yrs

from registration to satisfaction

Providers tracked

48

with 40 or more live facilities

The league table

Click any lender for its sector and regional concentration. Growth compares new facilities registered in 2025 against 2019, so it measures whether a lender is writing more business now than before the pandemic.

What the numbers say

The specialist market is bigger than it was before the pandemic. New registrations fell sharply in 2020, recovered through 2021 and 2022, and have run above pre-pandemic levels since 2023. Government-backed lending schemes absorbed a lot of demand in 2020 and 2021; what has happened since is a genuine return to commercial working capital.

The more useful number is facility life. The median facility runs for roughly two and a half to three years between registration and satisfaction, and it varies widely by lender. A short median is not a bad sign - it can mean smaller, shorter-term arrangements or clients who outgrow the facility. A long one suggests deeper, stickier asset-based relationships. Either way, if you are being sold a facility, the question worth asking is what the exit looks like.

Watch the divergence at the top. The clearing banks' commercial finance arms are registering fewer new facilities than they did in 2019, while several independents have grown by double and triple digits. The specialist market is not being consolidated by the banks. It is moving away from them.

Verification status

Every figure on this page is built from public filings, and the arithmetic reconciles. What is not yet complete is independent verification of each lender's product mix against source documents - confirming, lender by lender, that the charges it registers secure receivables finance rather than another product.

That work has already changed these numbers several times. Eleven entities have been removed after checking, including Together, Aldermore Bank, Handelsbanken, Reward Finance Group, Nucleus and the legacy Alliance & Leicester book, all of which register general lending that was being counted as invoice finance. Seven providers were added after being missed.

About a fifth of the charge records on this page sit with lenders whose product mix has not yet been independently verified: Bibby, 4Syte, Cynergy, Wells Fargo, Kriya / Allica, Investec Capital Solutions, ABN AMRO, Praetura, Pulse, Leumi, Crédit Agricole, Aurelius Finance Company, BZ Commercial Finance, Upstream Working Capital and ING. Several are well-known pure-play invoice financiers and are very unlikely to change; they appear here because the verification has not been done, not because the product is in doubt.

Treat the totals as a well-founded estimate rather than a settled count. The direction of travel is that verification removes charges more often than it adds them, so the figure for identified lenders is more likely to fall than rise - while the market as a whole is larger than shown, because Barclays and AIB cannot be separated from their parent banks and single-invoice funders frequently register no charge at all.

Method

Every charge registered at Companies House is public. An invoice finance or asset-based facility is almost always secured by a floating charge over all the company's assets, so we filtered the full register to outstanding charges of that type and grouped them by the entity holding the charge.

Lender names are filed as free text and are wildly inconsistent, and this market has consolidated heavily. Figures are matched at entity level, not group level: where a lender registers invoice finance through a named subsidiary, only that subsidiary counts, because the parent's charges cover property, asset and bridging lending that cannot be separated from it. Factor 21, Advantedge, Henry Howard and Optimum Finance count as eCapital; Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance and Alex Lawrie as Lloyds Bank Commercial Finance; Alliance & Leicester Commercial Finance as Santander; SME Invoice Finance as Metro Bank. Providers that have ceased trading are excluded, including Regency Factors, which entered administration in June 2026.

Source: Companies House register of charges, full extract. Charges filed as outstanding with a floating charge over all assets. Figures as registered. Built and maintained by Factor Now. Cite as: Factor Now, UK invoice finance lender tracker, 2026-09-16.