ING Lease UK has signed a deal to provide
asset finance for the business customers of Barclays Bank.
The alliance will enable Barclays SME
customers to obtain asset finance products through the bank six
months after it announced it would no longer provide asset finance
for the SME market.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Under the agreement Barclays will be
responsible for the sales and marketing of the products which they
will offer alongside their existing debt products through their
Business Banking division.
ING Lease will fund the assets and take
responsibility for the credit risk as well as the administration of
deals struck.
The agreement will run as a three month pilot
in eastern England after which both parties will assess the success
of the project with a view to rolling out the scheme as an option
to all Barclays Business customers.
Mark Picken, vice president of sales at ING
Lease UK, said ING want to make sure the deal runs smoothly from an
operational point of view.
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By GlobalDataHe added: “We are the market leader
intermediary funder in the UK and we are very keen to do our bit
providing funds to SMEs to acquire assets, that’s been our strategy
since we began.
“This deal means another introducer to help us
facilitate that desire.”
A spokesperson for Barclays said the two
companies have been working together on the deal for months and
added the reason the bank withdrew its own asset finance product
for SME customers was due to a lack of demand and because they felt
they offered more suitable lending alternatives such as loans and
overdrafts.
The spokesperson said working with a partner
to provide asset finance is an efficient way to make sure their
business customers have the full range of debt financing
products.
They added Barclays Corporate has continued to
offer asset finance as a core product and said there will be no
change in the levels of service or access to the variety of funding
options available to both Business and Corporate customers.
Barclays Business Banking announced it would
no longer provide asset finance to companies with turnover less
than £5m (€6m) a year in February 2011.
grant.collinson@vrlfinancialnews.com
