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• 08 Aug

  Invoice Finance UK

  

  Invoice Finance UK is a popular way of searching on the web for a receivables financing company to secure a facility such as factoring or invoice discounting. Particularly, if you are a company based in the United Kingdom and you are looking to improve your cash flow.

  Are You Looking For A UK-Based Invoice Finance Company?

  If you were looking for a UK-based invoice financing company, you are in the right place to get help with a quote search. FundInvoice is a multi-award-winning, independent brokerage that offers a UK-wide search service for all types of receivables finance. We are well reviewed by our customers and have found some big cost savings for our clients.

  Get A Quote Search Today With No Charge

  Either use the button below or call Sean on 03330 113622 and we will do all the work for you.

  REQUEST A QUOTE SEARCH

  We don't make a charge directly to you for using our service. Instead, we receive a commission from the provider should you choose to take out the facility. Bearing in mind that we can often find our client's substantial cost savings on quotes received elsewhere, using our quotation search is often considered a "no-brainer".

  More About Receivables Financing

  If you are looking to find out more about receivables financing, please see our comprehensive product page about Invoice Finance In The UK. This outlines the product, how they work, pricing and the benefits of using these services. It also has a link to our full guide.

  Invoice Finance UK

  As part of my ongoing research regarding this sector, I wanted to see how easy it was for companies that were seeking factoring or invoice discounting in the UK to find their way to either providers or reputable brokers. The competition to rank well in the online search engines is very high and this can often lead to prospects not finding their way to the best place immediately.

  Our Research

  To find out how hard it would be I did some research. I searched in the Google UK search engine for "invoice finance UK". Including the brackets should bring up exact matches to that search phrase. I only looked at the first page that was served by Google, as many people do not get any further than the first few entries that are returned.

  Page One Of Google

  On the first page of search results that were returned, the top 4 entries were sponsored content. This means that these are advertisers paying to achieve the top slot on the search engine pages. These are based on a pay-per-click bidding competition between parties. The placement of these results is driven by what they are spending.

  Sponsored Search Results

  In this case, the 4 sponsored results were for 2 brokers and 2 providers. The top of the two broker results was not a firm that I had heard of, and they were claiming “rates as low as 0.5%“. This is an interesting claim to head an advert as this would be a very low rate indeed. Also, it would not take into account other elements of the costing such as discount charges. Most likely, this would refer to the administration fee on an invoice discounting facility for a relatively large business. Again, this may not apply to the majority of small businesses that were searching for quotations, or those that were looking for products that included other aspects such as credit control services or non-recourse protection.

  Organic Search Results

  I then took a look at the organic search results. These are the pages that Google has decided should rank highest in their search results. The top result was for an organisation that provides information about invoice finance in the UK as well as other financial facilities for businesses.

  Of the remaining organic results, there were 7 well-known providers listed and two well-known brokers. The page finished with three more sponsored ads all of which were brokerage firms with 2 listed that I hadn’t previously heard of.

  How Easy Is It To Find Invoice Finance In The UK?

  Therefore, if the person searching understands something about how the search engines were, it would be relatively easy to find their way to some of the well-known invoice finance companies that operate within our sector. However, these might not always be those that are best suited to them. They may not immediately understand which were brokers and which were service providers.

  Broker Profiles

  There were a couple of well-known high-profile brokerage firms listed that would be able to conduct a quotation search across a variety of providers. One of them is a more generic finance brokerage and the other does specialise in these products.

  Thoughts About The Research Results

  I can’t help thinking that these results favour larger firms with bigger marketing budgets. In many cases, I have found that there are also benefits to be had from companies that are smaller independents that do not rank so well in the search engines. The FundInvoice brokerage service is very much a personal high-quality hand-holding service which stands it apart from many of its competitors. However, our site is unlikely to have the stature to rank so highly with the search engines.

  Also, if you are in a specific situation, perhaps looking for a particular product such as selective invoice finance, then it might have been difficult to find what you were looking for with such a generic search.

  Comparison Of Invoice Finance With Other Financial Services

  I went on to have a look at the comparative search terms that people tend to use when looking for invoice finance or assessing it as a possible option up against other financial services.

  The website "Answer The Public" provides some insights into the common search terms that are being used by parties searching the web. A couple of key searches that immediately stood out to me, were “invoice finance versus overdraft“ and “invoice finance versus factoring“.

  Invoice Finance vs Overdraft

  With regard to the comparison with overdraft, I have written previously about how overdraft facilities often compare. You can also see our calculator that compares the financial benefits of factoring against overdrafts.

  Invoice Finance vs Factoring

  It is interesting to see that people are searching for a comparison between invoice finance and factoring. The key reason is that invoice finance can be used as a term that actually encompasses factoring. However, I suspect that people sometimes confuse the phrase “invoice finance“ with “invoice discounting“.

  The primary difference between invoice discounting and factoring is that with factoring you receive a credit control service in addition to the pre-payments against invoices. In the case of invoice discounting, you only receive the pre-payments and you retain the credit control function in the house.

  The use of this search time suggests that there is still plenty of lack of understanding amongst businesses as to the differences between these products.

  Is Invoice Finance A Good Idea?

  Furthermore, my analysis showed that a common search term was: “is invoice finance a good idea“? Once again, this demonstrates that there is a lack of understanding of the services amongst the businesses that could potentially use them. Again, I have already set out some thoughts on that question.

  Gauging The Comparative Level Of Demand

  In order to gauge the level of demand for invoice financing services in the UK, I conducted some comparisons using an online tool called Google Trends. This tool allows you to compare multiple search terms and identify the volume of searches made for those particular terms. in this instance, I requested only searches made in the UK and this was for the past 12 months at the time of writing.

  Search Demand For Different Financial Services

  These were the figures that were returned (each shown as an average number of searches per day):

  • 84 for "overdraft"
  • 42 for "ABL" ("asset-based lending" only yielded 2 searches)
  • 14 for "factoring" ("debt factoring" only returned 2 searches as did "invoice factoring").
  • 10 for "trade finance"
  • 5 for "invoice financing"
  • 2 for "invoice discounting"
  • 2 for "receivables financing"

  Bear in mind that by searching for these terms it does not necessarily follow that the searcher would be a prospective user of these facilities. The purpose of the search could be for many other reasons, e.g., academic research. Also, some terms such as "receivables financing" may be more popular abroad rather than in the United Kingdom where other terms tend to be used.

  What Do These Results Show?

  Looking across these search results suggests that the number searching for overdrafts is significantly higher than those searching for the various types of invoice finance. Also, it has to be noted that some of the factoring searches could well relate to the mathematical usage of the word factoring.

  Interestingly, there was a reasonable volume of searches for ABL which could include people looking for products such as leasing or hire purchase.

  Overall, I think that these number suggests that more businesses could be aware of the invoice financing options that could prove to be more flexible than an overdraft in improving the cash flow of their business. There still seems to be much work to do in raising the profile of invoice finance in the UK.

  By Glenn Blackman