UK Specialty Finance Terms Index 2026

Edition 1, June 2026. Updated each cycle. Every figure is computed from our own lender, product and decline data.

FundBiz maps 29 distinct reasons a UK business can be declined for finance, each with a route forward, across a panel of 13 specialist lenders that are all FCA regulated and cover 16 specialty finance products. The UK Specialty Finance Terms Index tracks the terms that decide whether a business can borrow when the mainstream lenders say no, and is updated each cycle. The panel is small, so we report counts rather than percentages.

We map 29 distinct reasons a UK business can be declined for finance, each with a route forward, across a panel of 13 specialist lenders.

Headline findings

Methodology

Every lender in the FundBiz Business Finance Lender Index is recorded against a common schema (product type, ticket range, typical rate, decision time, soft-search availability and FCA status), alongside the FundBiz finance-type and decline-reason taxonomies. Because the specialist panel is small, we report counts over the panel rather than percentages, and we do not compute an average rate (specialist lenders price on factor rates, monthly rates and APR, which are not comparable). The method is held constant between editions, and the edition date reflects the most recent re-audit.

Download the data

The full indicator table is available as a CSV under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence:

UK Specialty Finance Terms Index, June 2026 (CSV)

Compiled by Oliver Mackman. Published by FundBiz. See also the Lender Index and our UK business finance statistics.