Close Brothers Asset Finance review UK 2026: a 1924 bank, a restated loan book and no published price

Which company actually signs your agreement

The name on the paperwork is Close Brothers Limited, company number 00195626, registered at 10 Crown Place in the City and incorporated on 9 February 1924. The bank's own wording on the hire purchase page reads: “Close Brothers Limited is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority (firm number 124750)…registered in England and Wales (company number 00195626)”. Its parent, Close Brothers Group plc (00520241), was incorporated in 1953 and shares the same address.

That is a firm number for the bank as a whole rather than a permission scoped to asset finance, which is the usual position. An asset finance agreement with a limited company is not a regulated credit agreement, so the protections that matter to you are the ones written into the contract. Close Brothers puts the security position plainly: “Finance is secured against the asset and/or equipment. If you're unable to keep up with your payments we may repossess the asset and/or equipment.” There is no personal guarantee wording on any asset finance page we read, which means nothing either way about whether one will be asked for.

What Close Brothers actually funds

Four structures are live: hire purchase, finance lease, operating lease and refinance. The hire purchase page describes payments that cover “the asset's depreciation” and “interest on the cost of the asset”, with ownership at the end: “At the end of the term, you get to choose to buy the asset and own it outright.” VAT is paid up front on the asset price and reclaimable if you are registered. On a finance lease the split changes: “If your business is VAT registered, you only pay VAT on the monthly rental payments, not on the entire purchase price.” At the end of a lease you can extend, sell the equipment and keep a share of the proceeds, or hand it back.

Refinance is the part of the range we use most. Close Brothers calls it sale and HP back: “you sell your equipment to us, and we lend you the money you need to invest in your business.” It works on assets owned outright and on assets already financed by somebody else, which is the harder case and the one that gets a business out of a bad agreement. The same page says the product is “suitable for businesses of all sizes, including sole traders”, so a self-employed operator with a tipper is inside the criteria.

The asset list runs from cars, vans, trucks, buses, coaches and trailers through agricultural machinery, construction and recycling equipment, manufacturing plant and printing machinery, plus a catch-all category the site labels “miscellaneous assets”. Growth Guarantee Scheme asset finance and commercial mortgages sit alongside. There is no published age limit on used equipment, and refinance by definition means the bank is already funding second-hand kit every day.

What it costs, and why we cannot tell you

Close Brothers publishes no price of any kind for asset finance. There is no rate, no arrangement or documentation fee, no option to purchase fee amount, no early settlement formula and no representative example on any page of closeassetfinance.co.uk. The nearest thing to a commercial term is the eligibility line: “Products and services are subject to eligibility, status, terms and conditions and availability. All lending is subject to status and our lending criteria.”

Deposit is described only as something you can “lower”, with no percentage given. Balloon payments are not mentioned on the hire purchase page at all, which is odd for a lender funding tractor units and buses where a balloon is standard practice. Minimum and maximum deal sizes are absent. Term appears once, as “typically up to five years” on hire purchase, and nowhere for the lease products.

We are not treating that silence as a criticism unique to Close Brothers, because none of the five asset finance lenders we reviewed this week publishes a rate card either. It does change how you shop. With a term loan you can rank offers before you apply. Here you cannot, so the only way to know what Close Brothers costs on your deal is to have the deal priced, which is the job we do when we put a proposal to more than one funder at once.

The loan book figure that changed after it was published

Anyone quoting the size of the Close Brothers asset finance book needs to know that two different numbers are correct for the same date. The FY2025 preliminary results, made up to 31 July 2025, put Asset Finance at £3,291.0m, down 3% from £3,388.5m a year earlier. The half year results to 31 January 2026 show the same 31 July 2025 date as £3,580.4m, with the book then at £3,637.9m.

The gap is £289.4m of “Asset Ireland” loans, which the group moved out of Invoice Finance and into Asset Finance between the two announcements. A footnote in the half year results explains it. Neither figure is wrong and neither should be quoted on its own: on the old basis the book shrank, on the new basis it grew 2% in the six months to January 2026. We report the restatement rather than picking the flattering half.

Two further exclusions sit under the headline. Asset Finance totals leave out the operating lease assets of Close Brothers Vehicle Hire, £157.0m at 31 January 2026, a business in wind-down, and Close Brewery Rentals, sold on 31 August 2025. The FY2025 commentary blames the decline on “lower volumes and large terminations in the Industrial Equipment Division” and names energy, agriculture and materials handling as the growth targets. If your asset sits in one of those three, appetite is being pointed at you.

The group behind the lender, and what its numbers mean for a borrower

Close Brothers Group reported a statutory operating loss before tax of £122.4m for the year to 31 July 2025, against a £132.7m profit the year before, with adjusted operating profit of £144.3m. The half year to 31 January 2026 showed a further loss before tax of £65.5m, better than the £102.2m loss in the comparable period, with the motor finance provision at roughly £300m. The group loan book was £9,242.6m at 31 January 2026. Around 2,600 people work there, and the group has said its changes “will result in a reduction of c.600 FTE by the end of 2027”.

None of that is a reason for a borrower to hesitate. You owe the lender, not the reverse, and a provision against historic motor commissions has nothing to do with a hire purchase agreement on an excavator. What it does tell you is the shape of the appetite you are applying into. Close Brothers has sold its asset management arm, Winterflood and Brewery Rentals, is exiting Vehicle Hire, and the FY2025 expense commentary refers to “workforce rationalisation in Asset Finance” and an “Asset Finance transformation programme”. A bank simplifying itself while you sign a five year agreement is worth knowing about, mostly because the person who wrote your deal may not be the person who services it.

Direct, broker, and the “up to £1m” figure you will see quoted

Close Brothers sells both ways. Its FY2025 announcement describes lending to more than 28,000 small and medium-sized businesses “through our in-house teams, where loans are originated via our direct sales force or introduced by third-party distribution channels”. Alongside that sits a separate broker-facing proposition, Close Brothers Business Finance.

You will see a “transaction values of up to £1m” figure attached to that proposition covering hard and soft assets. It comes from trade reporting of a Close Brothers announcement about merging Close Brothers Business Finance, Specialist Finance, the Braemar Finance broker team and Corporate Asset Solutions into one broker channel offering hire purchase, refinance, stocking finance and block discounting. We could not read it on a Close Brothers page: closebusinessfinance.co.uk returned no content on 7 September 2026. So it is third-party context, not the bank's own published cap, and we do not quote it to clients as a limit. The real ceiling on a Close Brothers deal is whatever the underwriter agrees.

What the reviews say, which is nothing

There is a Trustpilot profile for “Close Asset Finance Ltd” and it is empty: unclaimed, no reviews, no score, read on 7 September 2026. That is not a bad sign, it is an absent one. A bank writing this volume through brokers and a direct sales force simply does not collect public reviews the way an online lender does, and we will not manufacture a rating out of a blank page or borrow a score from a group-level profile that mixes savings accounts and motor finance with commercial equipment lending.

The signal we do have is operational rather than reputational. Close Brothers has funded UK equipment through every credit cycle since the 1920s, keeps its own field underwriters, and has an appetite for used and specialist plant that a general lender will not touch. That is the reason a deal goes there, and no review count would change it.