Guides
A business credit score improves when the records behind it improve: file on time, pay within terms, keep disputes out of court and check your file. What actually moves a UK business score, how to build one from day one, and how to see what creditors see.
Product
The UK’s main business credit report providers are Creditsafe, Experian, Equifax and Dun & Bradstreet, plus credit intelligence networks like Grand. The right choice comes down to five questions — including the two most buyers miss: what happens after the check, and can you ask the business itself
News
Institutional capital committed $1.5bn to SME lending the same week the Bank signalled rates stay higher for longer.
Institutional capital committed $1.5bn to SME lending the same week the Bank signalled rates stay higher for longer.
Westminster will legislate 60-day payment terms and mandatory interest — the biggest rewrite of UK trade credit rules in a generation.
Every credit decision asks three questions. Most tools only answer one—and we keep letting them answer all three. Think about the account that went wrong. Not the one that failed a check — the one that sailed through it. The report came back low risk. Clean score, green light. You
Today we're announcing that Grand has raised $5M in funding led by 20VC, with participation from NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures) and Firedrop. This is a milestone for us, but this post isn't just about the raise. It's about the mission we set out to
Ask a credit manager how they assess a new trade account and you won't hear about one system. You'll hear about five. Maybe six. A credit report from one provider, a Companies House check in another tab, an internal spreadsheet tracking payment history, an email thread
Credit decisioning hasn't changed in 20 years. Five tabs, stale data, and days of waiting. AI is about to change that, not by replacing credit teams, but by giving them continuous intelligence, forward-looking insight, and the ability to turn every decision into a growth opportunity.
Field notes on UK business credit, monitoring, and how AI is powering better credit intelligence decisions.
When cash tightens, businesses rarely stop paying everyone at once. They prioritise. A supplier's worsening payment times can mean it is moving down the customer's payment queue — and the time to notice is before the ranking gets tested.
Group credit risk is the exposure created by the companies connected to the legal entity you assess. A subsidiary can hold a clean file while depending on its group for cash. When the group fails, the entity-level view offers little warning.
Westminster will legislate 60-day payment terms and mandatory interest — the biggest rewrite of UK trade credit rules in a generation.
A ten-year business loan is a decade-long bet that a borrower you understand today stays one you understand tomorrow. A guarantee behind it reduces part of the lender’s eventual loss but does not detect deterioration before default. Monitoring decides whether you find out in time to act.
Second-order credit exposure is the risk you carry through the businesses that pay your customer. A supplier can hold a clean, on-time account and depend on one developer or contractor for most of its cash. If that payer fails, the loss can travel down the chain to a creditor who never assessed it.
Mansion House week widened SME credit supply — a £6.5bn BBB package, ten-year guarantee terms, a bank-capital review — while the private market added record facilities (Capital on Tap £750m, Funding Circle £900m). It all flows into a real economy that keeps contracting.
The summer outlooks agree: the shock is contained, but the gap between strong and vulnerable businesses is widening. Forecasts describe the average firm. Write-offs come from the tail. In a two-speed economy, the truth lives at account level.
The Late Payments Bill proposes a 60-day cap on payment terms, statutory interest at 8% over base and real enforcement. Good law — with a side effect for credit teams: when lateness gets expensive, struggling customers pay you on time for longer, and the ledger stops warning you.
Business identity fraud doesn’t beat the credit score — it chooses what the score sees. Why KYB and identity verification come before credit checks, and the three identity questions.
Credit exposure can grow while sales stay flat. The Two Books framework: why commercial dashboards hide the debtor book, and how merchants should monitor credit exposure.
Trade credit is unsecured business lending. Every supplier extending payment terms runs a loan book — here’s how to manage the debtor book like the lending portfolio it already is.
The constraint on UK B2B credit just moved: capital is no longer the limit on lending — underwriting judgment is.
