British Business Bank increases ENABLE funding facility to Henry Howard Finance
The British Business Bank, the UK government-owned economic development bank, has today announced a second £51m tranche of funding for Henry Howard Finance under the Bank’s ENABLE Funding programme. The transaction is the latest made under the programme, which aims to increase the supply of finance to smaller businesses in the UK looking to acquire business critical assets to boost their growth.
The facility, partially guaranteed by the European Investment Fund, comes on top of an existing £51m asset finance facility granted in 2016 and will allow Henry Howard Finance to extend its leasing and asset finance offering to a larger portfolio of UK smaller businesses.
One of British Business Bank’s key objectives is to diversify finance markets for smaller UK businesses. The ENABLE Funding programme helps to meet this objective by allowing smaller providers of business finance to be more active, and compete with larger providers. Providers of finance to smaller businesses often lack the scale required to access capital markets – a key source of funding for lending institutions – in a cost-efficient manner. The programme warehouses newly-originated finance receivables from different originators – bringing them together into a new structure, before refinancing a portion of its funding on the capital markets when it reaches sufficient scale.
Mark Catton, CEO at Henry Howard Finance, said:
“We are delighted to agree this additional facility with the British Business Bank. We are proud to support SMEs in the next chapters of their business success stories and this facility will allow more companies to grow and prosper.”
Reinald de Monchy, managing director of guarantee & wholesale sdolutions British Business Bank, said:
“Our ENABLE Funding programme helps support smaller finance providers who share our goal of increasing the supply of finance to smaller businesses. This increased facility will allow Henry Howard Finance to continue to build on their track record in providing much needed asset finance allowing these types of businesses to realise their growth potential.
“Since the first transaction in September 2015, the ENABLE Funding programme has supported lending to over 17,000 businesses and has committed more than £444m to smaller finance providers.”
British Business Bank programmes are supporting more than £5.2bn of finance to nearly 75,000 smaller businesses.