CFN’s members include accountancy firms and business advisers who specialise in raising finance for SME businesses, and in providing corporate finance expertise on deals carried out by owner managed and SMEs.

London fintech Capitalise.com will support CFN member firms to navigate the debt market with their accountant led funding platform. The platform enables access to over 100 lenders and thousands of lending products from the high street banks to the latest fintech P2P platform, covering the whole lending spectrum.

Kirsty McGregor, CFN founder, said: ‘In the past, our firms had close working relationships with the major lenders in the UK and we rarely needed to outsource the proposal to a finance broker. 

‘However the landscape for lending has changed beyond recognition in the last couple of years, and a myriad of new online lenders have sprung up. It's not practical for us to do comprehensive diligence on all these new products, nor build in-depth relationships with them, so we have been considering the market of brokers who specialise in this and the new wave of aggregator platforms.

‘I felt Capitalise had the philosophy and business model which most closely resembled the approach taken by professional service firms.’

Oliver Cummings, commercial director at Capitalise, said: ‘We spend a lot of our time at Capitalise helping accountants add business funding to their services. When working with CFN member firms, we find a great alignment of views and both parties really understand the lending challenges and together we know have to solve them.

‘We are confidence that this partnership will help the UK SME market by giving an already knowledgeable set of accountants with the tools and access to funding to help strengthen and build their clients for the journey ahead.’

Report by Pat Sweet