Identity comes before credit
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.
Latest
Your sales were flat. Your exposure wasn’t.
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.
Every trade account is a loan. Most just aren’t run like one.
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.
More capital to lend, less economy to lend into
The constraint on UK B2B credit just moved: capital is no longer the limit on lending — underwriting judgment is.
The check was never the decision
Approval feels like the decision. It’s actually the moment you know least about what happens next. Every credit process treats approval as the decision. You run the check, you approve or decline, you move on. But approval is the moment you know the customer best and your exposure to
Credit keeps flowing, the risk keeps building
This week's UK B2B credit signal: credit supply is loosening while receivables risk is rising.
Two companies, same sector, opposite risk — which one gets the tighter limit?
Two customers, same sector, same limit request. One is strengthening, one is weakening — and the sector view gives you one answer for both. Two customers sit in the same sector and ask for the same limit. One is strengthening. One is weakening. The sector view gives you the same answer
A reduced insurance limit is not an early warning
The email arrives on a Tuesday. Your trade-credit insurer has reduced the cover on one of your larger customers — a wholesaler you have shipped to for three years without a missed beat. Nothing has defaulted. There is no county court judgment, no news, no obvious reason. Just a number
Activity turns down while pricing turns back: the squeeze that the insolvency print still won’t show 🤷♂️
UK B2B credit and lending news digest, 21–27 June 2026 Summary UK private-sector activity tipped into contraction this week. The flash S&P Global UK Services PMI fell to 48.7 in June from 49.3 in May — a second straight month below 50 and the steepest
The reason moves before the credit score does
Two suppliers extend credit to the same building contractor. Same trade, same region, same credit score sitting quietly at the top of both their files. One of them shortens terms in early May and caps the exposure. The other keeps shipping on thirty-day terms until a winding-up petition
Low risk is not a lending limit
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
The first creditor to know gets paid. The last one writes it off.
CCJs, winding-up petitions, director changes and late filings rarely arrive without warning. The question is whether you see them in time to act. Two builders’ merchants supply the same contractor on the same 60-day terms. Same invoices, same exposure. When the contractor goes under, one merchant has been
UK credit supply loosens to the smallest borrowers as output turns negative
UK B2B credit and lending news digest, 7–13 June 2026 Summary New this week: UK monthly GDP turned negative for the first time since August 2025, contracting 0.1% in April as the Middle East conflict fed through to services output.(1)(2) What matters isn't the
Thoughts
How to prioritise collections using credit risk signals, not just aged debt
For most credit controllers, the aged debt report is still the starting point for the day. It shows what is overdue, how long it has been overdue, and where the biggest balances sit. But aged debt only tells you what has already happened. For experienced credit controllers, especially those managing
News
UK credit signals point to challenger growth and specialist lending friction
UK B2B credit and lending news digest, 17–23 May 2026 Opening Summary The British Business Bank confirmed a £350m ENABLE Guarantee with Allica Bank, including Sona Asset Management as another investor, to unlock up to £700m of SME asset-finance lending.¹ This is the week’s clearest credit-supply
News
Alt-lenders now lead UK SME credit as risk signals diverge
UK B2B Credit and Lending News Digest 10–16 May 2026 – Covering 10–16 May 2026. Summary Funding Circle’s 2025 Economic Impact Report, produced with Oxford Economics, confirmed that alternative providers and challenger banks now account for 68% of UK SME lending, making the Big Four the structural minority.
Thoughts
Credit risk monitoring: What UK finance teams should track
Checking credit risk is like checking the structural health of a bridge before sending heavy trucks across it. The bridge may still be open, but you need to know if cracks are forming, whether the load is getting heavier, and when it is time to slow down, reroute, or stop
Thoughts
Is AI finally fixing decades-old blind spots in credit scoring?
For decades, commercial credit assessment has suffered from the same fundamental problem. Most decisions are made using static snapshots of businesses that are constantly changing. Financial statements are outdated by the time they are filed. Credit reports often miss operational deterioration. Manual reviews depend heavily on fragmented data, analyst interpretation,
News
Banks adjust to a slower economy while credit remains open
UK B2B Credit Intelligence Digest — 3–9 May 2026 Summary The Construction Products Association cut its UK construction forecast to −2.5% for 2026, its biggest single downgrade on record, and the April construction PMI collapsed to 39.7 (from 45.6 in March). Two things to watch underneath the
Product
Everyone told us to keep AI out of credit. Here's why we built it anyway.
There's a question that shaped everything we built over the last year. What if AI's role in credit isn't to make the decision, but to help the person making it understand what's changing before it's too late? That question led
Thoughts
The growing pressure on UK CFOs to adopt AI
There's an old saying in business. What gets measured gets managed. But today, UK CFOs are discovering a harder truth. What doesn't get automated gets left behind. Across British boardrooms, the pressure to adopt artificial intelligence has stopped being a strategic conversation and started being a
News
UK credit & lending weekly digest
Risk moves off bank balance sheets — toward directors, suppliers and specialist finance — Covering 19–25 April 2026 · Published Tuesday 28 April 2026 Summary This week’s credit signal is fragmentation, not uniform tightening. Banks are still competing on mortgage pricing, while SME risk is surfacing through director guarantees, supplier payment
Product
Grand Product Round-up — Week 17
One thing we keep hearing from partners is just how fast we ship new stuff. We assumed, from years of building, that this was normal. It’s not. They’re used to incumbents moving in rigid cycles. A new product every few years. A feature release once a year. The
Thoughts
The complete guide to a company credit check and what most businesses miss
Running a company credit check once is like checking the weather the morning before a week-long sailing trip. Useful but not the same as watching the forecast every day. But most businesses are running them at the wrong moment, reading them the wrong way, and treating a single report