One of the biggest criticisms of the UK’s CBILS program was that it favored big banks and lending was too slow for small businesses; the new bounce back loan scheme has solved the speed issue in most cases however online lenders and challenger banks are being squeezed again; a group of non bank lenders sent a letter to the Bank of England asking for equal access to the bounce back scheme;“We have a market where a lot of money has been spent to introduce competition; what this program is at risk of doing is inadvertently reducing that by forcing people to move their primary banking relationship to the big banks,” Oliver Prill, CEO of Tide, said to the FT; fintech lenders make up about 30 percent of small business lending and they should have at least that share of the scheme; “This is exactly what happened with CBILS and the government spent the next few weeks trying to fix it,” said one executive to the FT. “Now they’ve made the same mistake again”. Financial Times
