New lenders join Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme

CBILS is delivered through more than 40 lenders and is designed to support the continued provision of finance to UK SMEs during the Covid-19 outbreak. The scheme enables lenders to provide facilities of up to £5m to smaller businesses across the UK who are experiencing lost or deferred revenues, leading to disruptions to their cashflow.

Following their approval, each lender will be putting in place the operations required to start lending under the scheme and will confirm shortly the dates from which they will be ready to start receiving CBILS applications from SMEs.

Shortly before the launch of CBILS, three lenders - Arkle Finance, Close Brothers and Secure Trust Bank - were accredited under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) scheme and have also been accredited under CBILS and are ready to take applications from smaller businesses. Coutts has been accredited for CBILS as part of RBS Group’s existing accreditation.

More than 80% of the UK’s smaller businesses have a finance relationship with the 40+ existing CBILS accredited lenders.

Keith Morgan, CEO of the British Business Bank, said: “Our accredited lenders have seen an incredible demand for CBILS in the past few weeks, so we are helping to meet that demand and provide even more choice for smaller businesses by approving additional lenders for accreditation to the scheme. These new lenders will be able to deploy vital funding and get additional finance flowing to smaller businesses across the UK as quickly as possible.”

Nick Fahy, CEO of Cynergy Bank, commented: “We are delighted to be included in this scheme. As a long-time advocate of entrepreneurs, we want to be able to support them through the good and bad times. Understandably the UK and global business community is facing a challenge like none we have seen in our lifetime and we are eager to do our bit in supporting our business customers in any way that we can and this scheme will allow us to do just that.”