Since its launch in 2011, Nucleus Commercial Finance has lent over £1billion to UK SMEs. They are on a mission to make ‘solution-led finance’ accessible to more UK businesses than ever before. We caught up with Nucleus to chat about what they have been up to this past year, and their vision for the future and for UK SMEs.
Nucleus has been nominated for both Lender of the Year and CBILS Lender of the Year.
1. How has Nucleus been helping SMEs over the past year?
We’ve been helping SMEs throughout the pandemic period by being part of the CBILS scheme. We’re proud to have lent over £190M through the scheme to businesses across the country in a variety of sectors.
As part of this process, we’ve also worked to enhance our customer experience to ensure it’s as seamless and easy as possible for businesses to get the help they need in such challenging times.
We’ve worked hard to enhance our automated underwriting engine to get decisions to customers quicker, enabling them to get the finance they need in a tenth of the time, so they can concentrate on getting back on their feet and to plan ahead for a post pandemic marketplace.
This also stretches to enhancements we’ve made to our introducer portal – myNucleus. We’ve ensured we have made significant upgrades to the user experience on the portal, all with the aim of making it easier for our introducer partners to not only submit their deals, but to also keep track of their status and ensure they get swift payouts for their customers.
We’re proud to say that all of the above has been recognised across the industry, with multiple award wins for our products, portal and exceptional service levels.
2. Has Nucleus made any changes to their lending to accommodate the difficulties faced by SMEs?
Absolutely. As mentioned above, we’ve enhanced our back-end technology to capture and analyse more data points so we can get faster, more accurate decisions to our customers to ensure they are fully focused on planning ahead for a time when restrictions are finally lifted.
We’ve made changes to our products as well, such as increasing the amount we lend on our Business Cash Advance facility, as well as introducing a brand new short term solution called Business Growth Loans. Our Business Growth Loans are simple, flexible short term loans with terms of 12 months that allow customers to borrow up to £50K for any business need. And for those customers who want a little extra help with their cashflow, we can top up these loans on a quarterly basis.
3. What makes Nucleus unique as a lender?
We are one of the very few multi product lenders in the market and this truly makes us stand out. We take a solutions based approach to lending and we always analyse the needs of our customers so that we can offer a bespoke solution that is best for their specific needs. The beauty of being a multi-product lender means we can even combine facilities to ensure our customers get the perfect solution for their growth plans.
What makes this all possible is the innovative technology we use in our risk and credit analysis process. The investment in this technology over the last 24 months has enabled us shorten our decision times. The proof is in the pudding – throughout this pandemic period, over 90% of all our applications have been decisioned in a tenth of the time, with funding to customers being issued so much faster than before.
4. Do you have any advice for SMEs who are hesitant to take out funding?
What we would say is that future proofing your businesses has never been more important. What these last 12 months has taught us is that you never know what’s around the corner. So many businesses were unfortunately blindsided by the pandemic and had it not been for important facilities like CBILS, the ratio of businesses that had to close during this period would have been devastatingly higher.
Ensuring your business has funds in reserve to tackle unexpected periods is of paramount importance. What’s equally important is looking to the future and a post pandemic marketplace too. Businesses need to be prepared for the inevitable uplift in sales once restrictions are finally eased. Getting (and staying) ahead of the game, as well as ensuring there are plans in place to capitalise on the upcoming peak in trade – these are two huge priorities for businesses across the country.
5. What can we expect to see from Nucleus now that CBILS has come to a close?
You can certainly expect us to continue to innovate and create better financial solutions for businesses across the UK. Our aim is to continually evolve as a lender and we always strive to deliver the very best products and services across the board. As restrictions ease, we’re going to be working tirelessly to improve on our best-in-class user experience to enable us to serve as many businesses as we possibly can.
The winners of the SME Funding Awards 2021 will be announced on Wednesday 26th May. To see the full list of nominees and panellists, click here.
