A new specialist finance platform aimed squarely at the UK’s construction and manufacturing sectors has launched in a bid to ease one of the most persistent headaches facing small business owners: getting the bank to say yes.
SME Funded, founded by construction mergers and acquisitions specialist Bradley Lay, has positioned itself as the country’s first genuine one-stop shop for funding in these two capital-hungry industries. The platform combines access to more than 130 lenders with its own deployable capital, promising faster decisions and more flexible terms than the traditional high street route.
The timing is pointed. British SMEs have spent the past two years navigating tighter lending criteria, lengthening approval times and a noticeable retreat from small business banking by the major clearers. The Federation of Small Businesses has repeatedly warned that funding bottlenecks are throttling growth at precisely the moment the country needs it most, while construction insolvencies remain stubbornly high and manufacturers wrestle with input cost volatility.
Lay, who knows the construction sector intimately after helping scale a business from £12 million to more than £150 million in revenue before exiting in 2022, is blunt about the problem he is trying to solve.
“SMEs are the backbone of the UK economy, yet when it comes to finance, they’re often underserved,” he said. “Traditional lenders are slow, restrictive and risk averse. When businesses are growing, they hold them back, and when they’re under pressure, they step away. We built SME Funded to change that. This is about giving business owners real access to capital, quickly, intelligently and without unnecessary barriers.”
The product range is deliberately broad: business loans, asset and equipment finance, bridging and property finance, motor finance and software finance, each structured around the individual borrower rather than slotted into a generic template. The pitch is that working capital, growth funding and trading lifelines should look different for a Midlands precision engineer than they do for a London-based subcontractor, and the platform is built around that distinction.
What separates SME Funded from the broker pack, the company argues, is service. Rather than acting as a matchmaker and walking away, the team takes what it calls a “white-glove” approach, structuring deals, positioning the borrower’s story to lenders and managing the process end to end. A three-step application aims to get business owners from enquiry to funds in days rather than weeks.
The team has already worked with more than 600 UK business owners, an experience base that informs both the platform’s design and its sector focus. A spokesperson for the firm said: “Too many strong businesses are held back by slow processes, rigid criteria and a lack of understanding from traditional lenders. Our role goes beyond simply finding a lender. We structure funding properly, tell the right story and manage the entire process, so our clients can focus on running and growing their business.”
Lay’s pedigree adds weight to the proposition. As co-founder of Peak Capital Group and founder of TrueNorth Capital Group, he has led strategic acquisitions across the UK and European construction markets and has advised more than 100 SME owners on growth, financial strategy and exit planning. Having sat on both sides of the deal table, he understands what lenders actually want to see and where SMEs typically fall short in presenting it.
With the economic outlook still uncertain and high street appetite for SME lending showing few signs of recovery, SME Funded is betting that a sector-specialist, capital-backed platform can carve out meaningful share. If the company delivers on its promise of speed, certainty and proper deal structuring, it may have identified one of the more compelling gaps in Britain’s small business finance market.
