Commercial finance brokers losing up to two days a week to cases that never complete
New analysis from multifi, the specialist lender providing flexible cashflow solutions to UK SMEs, has found that fragmented lender criteria and cases that fall away before funding are taking a significant toll on broker capacity.
multifi found that up to two working days a week could be lost by brokers on cases that never reach completion, as advisers contend with a wider and more complicated SME funding market.
The analysis, Broker Your Time Back, estimates that brokers spend significant time working out lender fit, preparing applications and managing cases that later fall away. The pressure comes as brokers take a larger role in how smaller businesses access funding. Around £50bn of SME finance was arranged through brokers in 2025, according to the NACFB, while 68% of SME lending now sits outside the big-five banks.
The report also points to the commercial consequences of the time lost on deals that go nowhere. SME loan applications succeed 37% of the time overall, and one in four SME clients funded through a broker had first been turned down by another lender. For many brokers, that makes early diagnosis as important as lender access.
To simplify the process for brokers, multifi has launched BrokerScope, a broker-support tool intended to give advisers a fast, straightforward view of a business before they invest time in a case. BrokerScope reads a company’s record at Companies House and checks it against multifi’s lending criteria, so a broker can see before the first call whether a case is worth working. If a business falls outside multifi’s criteria, BrokerScope says why and names the types of finance that usually suit that profile, such as asset finance or invoice finance. If nothing on the record stands in the way, BrokerScope takes the broker straight to the next step: logging in to the multifi platform and starting the application.
Brokers can check one company or a whole list of companies at once. They can also download a one-page company summary to share with their client and use live chat to ask questions about the information shown in BrokerScope. Additionally, brokers can also ask BrokerScope to watch a business and flag when its record changes, for example the day a young company reaches a year of trading. A week after each check, BrokerScope asks the broker whether the case went anywhere. multifi will use those answers to test the assumptions in Broker Your Time Back against real case data.
Rob Keown-Boyd, CEO at multifi, said: “More lenders should mean more options, but in practice each has its own credit appetite, product structure and application process. A case that looks straightforward at first can quickly turn into a long exercise in lender matching, document gathering and explaining why a business has already been declined elsewhere.
“Brokers are doing the hard yards behind the scenes, working out whether a deal has a chance, chasing information, packaging cases and then finding that the client has changed course or a lender has said no. It is part of the job, of course, but it has become normal to spend far too much time on work that goes nowhere.
“Part of giving brokers time back is being straight when a case isn’t for us. If BrokerScope can see a business doesn’t fit, it says so at the start and points to the kinds of finance that usually do. That’s six to ten hours of packaging a broker doesn’t spend on a submission that was never going to land.
“Losing two days a week to deals that never complete is a huge opportunity – if we can fix that, brokers get time back to go out and support more businesses and drive more lending into the firms that are the lifeblood of the UK economy. If the industry wants to serve more businesses well, it needs to cut the repeated work that holds brokers back and give them a clearer early view of which cases are likely to move forward.”