Welcome to what is becoming the usual bank bashing blog. Time and time again we see the banks looking at ways of restricting cash to their customers. No doubt they think they are not doing it on purpose however when customers need the banks more than ever in these difficult times the banks continue to pull in the credit.
Yesterday we reviewed an invoice discounting facility operated by one of the big four banks. Although the business has been trading for less than 12 months most of their customers are blue chip and as such there were no problems obtaining decent credit limits. However this particular bank would only fund up to a maximum of 10% of the total debtor book for any one customer. Therefore if one customer represented 20% of turnover and say for arguments sakes this amount was £200, 000 of turnover, invoice finance with this particular bank would only provide 80% of £100,000. Now imagine three or four customers represented more than 10% of turnover this could have a massive affect on available funds. In the case we looked at the headline prepayment was 85% of outstanding debtors however in reality only 51% was actually being funded. As one can imagine this is having a massive detrimental affect on cash flow and their ability to trade.
Not all invoice factoring companies will provide such inflexibility and a well chosen invoice factoring company can often provide the right flexibility.
