No matter what, Cash is always King

Cash flow is the maker and breaker of any business. You can have all the massive annual contracts and future projections in the world, but if your current cashflow doesn’t stack up, your business is doomed. As such, it might not be surprising to know that cash flow is becoming an increasingly important sector of...

We're delighted to have been published by The Caterer talking about finding finance for the hospitality world.

Are unsecured loans really a “poison pill”?

There are many different ways to get a loan. We’ve talked about a number of them in these blogs, and you’ll find even more on our website. However, the financial process has another part to it – security. Security is a deceptively complex topic, with a lot of different interpretations to be had. So, here’s...

A Universal SME Finance Platform – Ideal Future, or a Pipe Dream?

Lenders aren’t homogeneous. That’s one of the big challenges of SME finance. Different lenders will want things presented in different ways. We won’t lie, it can make for a challenging process sometimes where you have to re-arrange an application every single time you put it forward. A lot people think that should change. At an...

When a bank is selling itself, how can it be financing you?

It’s a little odd to hear, but banks fairly regularly get sold. Whilst the high-street banks that everybody knows are too big to be bought and sold wholesale, smaller parts of them and other smaller banks are fairly constantly being bought, sold, and traded for various purposes. Now, you might think “so what” to this...

How many banks are there? So many more than you think.

If you asked your average business owner to name as many banks as they could think of, we’d bet that they’d struggle to get past 10, and almost definitely wouldn’t hit 20. Once you get past the big high-street banks like Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC, most peoples’ knowledge of banks dries up. This is emblematic...

AI and Fintech – Can you trust a computer with your loan?

There’s a strong argument being made to start leaving many major finance decisions to AI. An AI can react faster, spot trends sooner and analyse more data than any human – it’s easy to see why it’s a sensible decision. But is this wise for the broking world, where personality can mean so much? Fintech...

Do small businesses really need to get bigger? How business expansion factors into finance.

Every business needs finance. It’s practically a fact of a business owner’s life. At some point, your business will want to grow, and you’ll need the funds to make it happen. However, there’s a prevailing myth about what comes with finance that we’d like to talk about. That myth is the idea that every business...

What does it mean to “know” a bank? How brokers and bankers do business together.

At ASC, we’re proud of knowing our lenders. We think we have a right to be – not many brokers have 50 years of experience doing business. So, where some might only know the banks that won’t lend, we know the banks that will. But what exactly does “knowing” a bank mean? How does it...

A Manufactured Issue – Financing Medium Businesses

Here at ASC, we write a lot about the work we do with small businesses. When you work in the SME sector, it’s a reasonable thing to do – 95% of companies in the UK have fewer than 5 staff. However, just because the majority of businesses are small, it doesn’t mean that we should...