Online broking platform taps into underserviced market

Speaking to The Adviser, founding director Simon Isaacs explained that the panel of lenders offers SMEs a range of commercial products from cash flow finance to equipment finance, trade finance and debtor finance.

According to Mr Isaacs, the increasing demand for commercial lending has seen the platform grow from 19 to 53 lenders and from processing 40 to approximately 600 commercial loan applications for per month.

“Businesses have been crying out for capital for many years,” Mr Isaacs commented, “They can’t access capital from banks”.

“The number of alternate business lenders and the product offerings that they’re providing are growing rapidly so there’s more lenders, there’s more products on offer,” he said.

Although the platform allows small businesses to be matched directly with business lenders, Mr Isaacs explained that brokers still play an important role in the process.

“With business finance, the range is quite complicated so in many cases brokers’ expertise is still required,” Mr Isaacs remarked.

“What brokers often do is the input their details into the system on behalf of their client,” he said.

“Traditionally when you’re running a small business and you can’t get your funding from a bank, you generally just give up at that point, but now I think that awareness is growing and businesses know that there are many different options out there for them. And eBroker is making that a lot easier.”

Mr Isaacs added that the response from SMEs has been overwhelmingly positive as the site has given them a simple and convenient way to compare lenders’ product offerings before applying.

Having refined and rebuilt the site’s matching engine five times, Mr Isaacs said that eBroker is continuously working on improving the algorithm that matches the lenders to SMEs.

[Related: The next growth market]