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A multifi report for commercial finance brokers
Brokers now arrange around £50 billion of SME lending a year. This report pulls together the public data on where that work actually goes, and models the one number nobody publishes: how much of your week disappears on cases that never pay out.
For most of the last century, an SME that needed money walked into its bank. That world has gone. Challenger and specialist banks now provide 60% of gross SME bank lending, up from 39% in 2012, and once non-bank lenders are counted, 68% of all SME lending came from outside the big-five banks. Someone has to steer a business through that scattered market, and it is you.
That is the good news, and it is real. The harder news is what it costs. A broker is paid only when a deal completes, yet the hours go in up front, on every case, most of which never draw down. This report follows the money and the minutes, and it is honest about which is which: every verified figure is cited, and the one modelled figure, the wasted week, shows all of its working.
A quarter of the clients funded through a broker had already been turned down elsewhere. The judgement the banks dropped moved to your desk, and the data shows how much work it is doing.
Six lenders weighed on an average deal, across criteria that move without notice. We model what that costs you in hours before a single document is chased.
The number nobody publishes, modelled with every assumption on the page: how much of a broker’s week goes on deals that die. You can rebuild it and test it against your own desk.
A cautious, first-time borrower who has been taught to expect a no. Confidence in a future application has fallen from 56% to 32% since 2019.
Most commercial lending sits outside the FCA’s Consumer Duty, which leaves the standard of care in your hands, not the regulator’s. That is a risk, and an edge.
Where the hours are worth spending, the one survey question that would turn the wasted-week estimate into hard data, and the tool we are building to cut the waste, BrokerScope.
Most market reports present every number as fact. This one tags each section. Verified figures come from named sources, chiefly the NACFB, the British Business Bank, BVA BDRC, the ONS and the Insolvency Service, and are given as fact with the citation. Modelled figures are our own estimates, built on stated assumptions and labelled as such. Where a credible number does not exist, we say so rather than invent one.
Commercial finance brokers, NACFB members, and anyone whose week is spent packaging SME cases and chasing lenders. If you are paid on completion and carry the cases that don’t, this is about your economics. Lenders and partners will find it a straight read on the channel they now depend on.
Two of the costs in this report, the hours lost to lender-matching and the ones lost to dead deals, are what BrokerScope is built to cut. It reads any UK company in seconds and gives you a straight verdict, so the hours go on the cases worth working.
A free, data-led report from multifi on where a commercial finance broker’s time and value go in 2026. It gathers the public data on the broker channel and models the share of the working week lost to deals that never complete.
Commercial finance brokers, NACFB members, and the lenders and partners who work with them.
It is modelled, not surveyed, with every assumption shown: the number of lenders weighed per case, the hours to package a case, and the share of worked cases that fall through. You can rebuild it and change the inputs.
Named sources cited throughout: the NACFB, the British Business Bank, BVA BDRC’s SME Finance Monitor, iwoca’s SME Expert Index, the ONS and the Insolvency Service. A full appendix lists every figure with its source and date.
Neither. It is research. There is no rate, no application and nothing to sign.
This report is for information. Verified figures are cited; modelled figures are labelled and derived from stated assumptions. Published by multifi, September 2026.
