Surprising sources of business funding ? – perhaps not

If businesses are trading through online sales platforms like PayPal and Amazon, it is clearly of mutual benefit for those platforms to help smaller businesses with their expansion plans.

PayPal provides cash advances of up to £100,000 based upon a company’s trading history with them and it says that approved funding can be released within 15 minutes. PayPal states that it has lent £625m to small UK companies, a 56% increase while Amazon has a loan book of over £3 billion. 

These trading platforms are able to assess risk on current data which the banks do not have, they are still using older legacy IT systems.