iwoca doubles the size of its Flexi-loan to £500K to meet the demand for larger loans

By Joy Dumasia

iwoca, one of Europe’s small business lenders, announced that it is more than doubling the maximum size of its core lending product, Flexi-Loan, allowing small business owners to access up to £500,000. The lender is evolving its most popular product, previously capped at £200,000, to meet the growing appetite for high-value loans in the small business sector.

The decision to increase the loan cap follows iwoca seeing current and new customers applying for higher value loans through COVID-19 government loan schemes: the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS). In addition, the lender’s most recent SME Expert Index, a quarterly survey of UK brokers, showed that demand for loans over £200,000 increased compared with last year, rising by 8 percentage points between Q2 2021 and Q1 2022.

The increased loan size allows iwoca to cater for the needs of more small businesses, offering them the opportunity to access finance which meets their individual needs, with some looking to invest for the future and others looking to manage their cash flow in the current challenging economic environment. Small businesses will be able to borrow between £1,000 and £500,000 over a period of one day to two years with iwoca’s flexible business loans. With a rapid application process, small businesses will be able to apply for a loan in just five minutes, with money landing in their bank account within 24 hours, in many cases.

Christoph Rieche, Co-Founder and CEO of iwoca, said: “All of our customers and partners tell us that they love the fast decisions we offer them; for amounts of £250,000, we make firm offers in less than a day. However, larger small and medium-sized businesses also told us that our maximum loan amounts were too low for them to be relevant, and therefore I am delighted that from today we’ll be upping them to £500,000.

With loans up to £500,000, we now cover an ever-larger portion of the SME market. We serve the smallest micro-business that just got started all the way to established medium-sized enterprises regardless in which industry they operate. I am proud that we’ve already helped more than 70,000 businesses to access finance over the last 10 years, and we won’t stop innovating to serve them better in the future.”

Recently, IBS Intelligence reported that iwoca, one of Europe’s largest small business lenders, has announced the expansion of its merchant cash advance product to all small businesses accepting card payments in the UK. The merchant cash advance will enable small businesses to repay their loan based on their sales and stay in control by choosing what percentage of their revenue to pay.