Glenn Blackman of Cashflow Acceleration Limited reports his findings of a recent survey on the awareness of the UK invoice finance industry within SMEs.

“A couple of months ago I reported that our research regarding small and medium sized enterprises had revealed that 42% of SMEs hadn’t been able to name a single invoice finance company when asked.

“This leaves the remaining 58% of respondents that were able to name an invoice finance company. This is the list of the 8 invoice finance companies that were mentioned by those respondents:

• 24% Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance
• 13% RBS Invoice Finance
• 8% Barclays Sales Financing
• 5% Bibby Factors
• 3% HSBC
• 2% Close Invoice Finance
• 2% Venture Finance
• 1% GE

“It is interesting that only 8 different providers were mentioned. It is also clear from these results that over 80% of those that were able to name an invoice finance company named one of the major bank-owned invoice financiers, rather than one of the independent companies which appear to be much less well known.

“This may not be surprising when you consider that only 20% of the SMEs that we questioned had seen any advertising regarding invoice finance over the last year and all of those that had seen advertising said that it came from a bank-owned invoice finance company.

“These results suggest that there remains a huge opportunity for all invoice finance companies, but perhaps in particular independent invoice finance companies, to raise awareness of their brands amongst SMEs in order to grow their market share.”

Glenn Blackman MBA MCIM writes regarding invoice finance and related matters at: www.glennblackman.co.uk. Glenn is also the Managing Director of Cashflow Acceleration Limited, a specialist invoice finance brokerage.