Relationship lending in a self-service world: What invoice finance clients now expect from their funder’s portal
Sponsored content. This article was supplied by a third party and Business Money has been paid to publish it.
Ask a finance director who runs an invoice discounting facility what frustrates them about their funder, and the answer is rarely the discount rate. It is more likely to be the Thursday afternoon spent waiting to hear whether a debtor’s payment has been allocated, or the third email asking for an aged debt report that was already sent. The money matters, of course. But the day-to-day experience of running a facility is shaped by small administrative exchanges, and that is where many funders still feel stuck in another decade.
The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate. UK Finance says its invoice finance and asset-based lending members are providing well over £20 billion at any one time to tens of thousands of UK businesses, and that the businesses they supported in 2024 had combined turnover of more than £315 billion. That is a large client base generating a steady stream of routine questions, most of which still land in the inbox of a relationship manager or a client services team.
The relationship problem nobody talks about
The industry has always sold itself on relationships, and rightly so. Underwriters who understand a client’s debtor book, its seasonality and the quirks of its biggest customers make better lending decisions, and clients notice the difference.
The trouble is that relationship managers spend a large slice of their week on work that has nothing to do with the relationship. Confirming availability. Re-sending statements. Chasing a missing schedule of offer. Explaining why a particular invoice has been disapproved for funding. None of this requires judgement, yet all of it competes for time with the conversations that do, such as whether a client needs a temporary uplift ahead of a big order or whether a concentration limit still makes sense.
Clients feel the cost too, because cash flow pressure rarely keeps office hours. Research by London Economics for the Department for Business and Trade found that businesses affected by late payment spend an average of 86 hours of staff time a year chasing what they are owed. For a client already stretched by slow-paying customers, waiting a day for its funder to confirm a simple availability figure is one more delay it could do without.
What a good funder portal actually does
Most funders now offer some form of online access, but there is a wide gap between a login page that displays a static balance and a portal that takes real work off both sides.
The better examples let the client see live information without having to ask for it: current availability, funds in use, recent receipts and how they have been allocated, and the status of any invoices awaiting verification. They also let the client act, uploading schedules, submitting drawdown requests and sending supporting documents through a secure channel instead of as email attachments. And, crucially, they give the client a structured way to raise a query and see where it stands. That last piece is the one many funders skip.
It is also where commercial finance can borrow from customer service practice in other sectors. A well-designed client portal combines searchable self-service content with secure request submission and tracking, so a client can either find the answer to a common question on its own or log a request that is routed to the right person and stays visible until it is resolved. For the funder, that means fewer duplicate emails and a record of every query. For the client, it removes the uncertainty of not knowing whether anyone has picked up its message.
Help content matters more than it might appear. A large share of client queries are about process: how to add a new debtor, what counts as a disputed invoice, how quickly a drawdown clears, what is needed for an annual review. Answering those once, clearly, in a place the client can find at nine o’clock at night, is a modest investment with a long payback.
Freeing people for the work that counts
None of this replaces the relationship manager. If anything, it gives the role room to become what the industry has always said it is. When availability checks and statement requests run through the portal, the conversations that reach a person tend to be the ones that need one: a client with a major customer in difficulty, a business planning an acquisition, a finance director worried about seasonal headroom.
There is a competitive angle as well. The British Business Bank notes in its latest Small Business Finance Markets report that around half of smaller businesses seek external finance, that use of flexible forms of finance to support cash flow increased in 2025, and that the market now includes a far wider range of challenger, specialist and non-bank providers than it did fifteen years ago. More choice means clients compare service as well as price. Brokers do the same when recommending a funder to a client who will live with the arrangement for years, and the ease of running a facility day to day is a big part of what they are judging.
Security is often the reason funders hesitate, so it deserves a word. Debtor ledgers, bank details and management accounts are sensitive, and an inbox full of attachments is a poor place to keep them. A portal with role-based access, two-factor authentication and an audit trail is a tighter control environment than email ever was.
Getting it right
The funders that make this work usually start with the questions clients actually ask. Pull three months of client services email, sort it by topic, and the pattern tends to be obvious. A handful of query types account for most of the volume, and those are the ones to solve first, either with clear self-service content or with a request form that captures the right information the first time.
They bring relationship managers in early, too. A portal that RMs see as a threat will be quietly bypassed, with clients told to “just email me” as they always have been. One that RMs see as a way to get their afternoons back tends to stick.
Then they measure it. Query volumes, response times and the proportion of questions resolved without a person stepping in are straightforward numbers to track, and they give a funder something concrete to show when clients and brokers ask what has changed.
SME owners have always wanted the same three things from a lender: money, a lender who understands their business, and a relationship. A good portal does not compete with any of them. It clears away enough of the routine that the second and third finally get the attention they deserve.