The decision to increase the loan cap follows iwoca seeing current and new customers applying for higher value loans through COVID-19 government loan schemes: the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS). 

In addition, the lender’s most recent SME Expert Index, a quarterly survey of UK brokers, showed that demand for loans over £200,000 increased compared with last year, rising by 8 percentage points between Q2 2021 and Q1 2022.

The Q1 2022 SME Expert Index found growing their business’ was the most common loan purpose for small business (43%), followed by ‘managing day to day cash flow’ (31%) and ‘bridging occasional cash flow gaps’ (10%). 

From today, small businesses will be able to borrow between £1,000 and £500,000, over a period of one day to two years with iwoca’s flexible business loans.

Christoph Rieche, Co-Founder and CEO of iwoca, said: “All of our customers and partners tell us that they love the fast decisions we offer them; for amounts of £250,000 we make firm offers in less than a day. However, larger small and medium sized businesses also told us that our maximum loan amounts were too low for them to be relevant and therefore I am delighted that from today we’ll be upping them to £500,000.

“With loans up to £500,000 we now cover an ever larger portion of the SME market. We serve the smallest micro-business that just got started all the way to established medium sized enterprises - regardless in which industry they operate. I am proud that we’ve already helped more than 70,000 businesses to access finance over the last 10 years, and we won’t stop innovating to serve them better in the future.”

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