Novuna Business Finance review UK 2026: the dormant company, the real lender and a three year trading bar

The company you think you are borrowing from is dormant

Search Companies House for Novuna Business Finance and you will find Novuna Business Finance Ltd, number 13153157, incorporated on 22 January 2021 and registered in Manchester. Its SIC code is 99999, dormant company. It does not lend. Anyone running a credit check or a due diligence file against that number is looking at an empty shell.

The lender is Mitsubishi HC Capital UK PLC, number 01630491, incorporated on 21 April 1982 and registered in Cardiff, with its office at Novuna House, Thorpe Road, Staines-upon-Thames. It was Hitachi Credit (U.K.) PLC until 2003 and Hitachi Capital (UK) PLC until 14 February 2022. Its filed SIC codes are financial leasing, credit granting by non-deposit-taking finance houses, and factoring. Novuna's footer states the position plainly: “Novuna is a trading style of Mitsubishi HC Capital UK PLC Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Financial Services Register no. 704348…Registered in Cardiff under company no. 1630491.”

Why this matters beyond pedantry: the name on your agreement, on your credit search and on any future dispute is Mitsubishi HC Capital UK PLC. The FRN quoted covers the whole trading style rather than a permission scoped to asset finance, which is normal, and an agreement with a limited company sits outside the regulated credit regime anyway. Its accounts to 31 March 2026 were filed on 19 June 2026, though no PDF is available to download from the public filing history, so the group performance table on the Mitsubishi HC Capital UK site is the only route to current figures.

Hire purchase and leasing, and nothing that looks like a loan

Novuna funds equipment two ways. Hire purchase gives you ownership at the end and lets you “claim Tax writing down allowances, offset repayment interest against profits and re-claim VAT (if you are VAT registered)”. Business finance leasing keeps ownership with the lender: the site says you will not own the asset at the end of the agreement. Variable deposits and balloon payments are both available and are described as ways to reduce the periodic payment. Repayments “can be designed to match your business income and expenditure cycles”.

Beyond that sit project finance, business to business finance, stock finance and block discounting, which are wholesale and vendor products rather than something a single business buying a machine would use. There is no operating lease named on the site and no refinance product for assets you already own, which is a real gap against Close Brothers and Aldermore, both of which will release equity from kit already on your balance sheet.

Novuna also states an exclusion most lenders leave implied. Its eligibility panel says applicants should be “Looking for Hire Purchase or Leasing agreements. We don't currently offer business loans”. For a funder of this size that is a striking thing to put in writing, and it saves everybody a conversation. The sectors it names are transport and logistics, manufacturing and technology, green assets, construction, agriculture, healthcare, garage equipment, business cars and renewable energy. Technology cover extends to desktops, laptops and mobiles, EPOS systems, networking and telephony equipment and servers, which is soft asset territory that several competitors are stepping back from.

Three years’ trading and 10% down

The published bar is specific. To apply you must be “A UK based Limited Company, Public Limited Company, Limited Liability Partnership, Sole trader or Partnership”, have “been trading for a minimum of three years”, and be looking for hire purchase or leasing. Three years is the hardest published trading requirement of any lender in this group and it is not framed as a preference.

Deposit follows the same pattern: “We normally ask for a minimum 10% deposit, however we will look at each application in terms of affordability and customer requirements and the actual deposit amount proposed will be the best fit for your circumstances.” Ten percent of a £120,000 machine is £12,000 of your own cash on day one, before VAT, and that is the number to plan around unless the underwriter says otherwise. On information, Novuna asks for “your latest accounts, and we may also look at your bank statements”.

The VAT question is left open, and on a machinery purchase that is real money. Novuna confirms you can reclaim VAT on a hire purchase agreement if you are registered, but it does not say when the VAT falls due. On a £120,000 machine the VAT is £24,000 at the standard rate, and whether that lands on day one or spreads across the rentals decides what your cash flow forecast looks like for a quarter. Close Brothers and Aldermore both publish the answer for their own agreements: VAT on the full asset price up front under hire purchase, VAT on the monthly rentals under a lease. Novuna leaves it to the documents, so ask.

Set that against Simply Asset Finance, which says in writing that it will consider a new-start company. If a business has two years of accounts and a good order book, Novuna is the wrong door and there is no point testing it. One useful line from its FAQ for anyone weighing asset finance against an overdraft: “Asset finance, unlike an overdraft, is not repayable on demand.”

What it costs, and what is missing from the site

Novuna answers the pricing question with a non-answer: “Interest rates vary depending on the current market situation, and these would be agreed with you before you finalise your finance agreement.” There is no rate, no fee schedule, no representative example and no early settlement formula anywhere on novuna.co.uk. Payment amounts and dates are “agreed with you at the start of the finance period”.

The absences go further than price. No minimum or maximum funding amount is published. No term length is published. Nothing on the site says whether used equipment is funded or how old an asset may be, and the asset finance FAQ set is silent on second-hand kit, which is unusual for a lender funding tractor units and plant. Personal guarantee wording does not appear either.

Group figures give some context for how a deal might be priced. Mitsubishi HC Capital UK reported profit before tax of £79.1m for the year to 31 March 2026, down 34% from £120.6m, while new business volume rose to £5.54bn from £4.65bn and net earning assets reached £9.6bn. The bad debt charge moved from 0.32% to 0.39% of total assets. More lending, thinner margin and slightly higher losses is a combination that usually shows up as firmer pricing and tighter credit decisions rather than as looser ones. The group employs over 2,200 people and reports over 1.4 million customers.

Why we are not quoting a review score

There is one Trustpilot profile carrying the Novuna name and we will not put it on this page as a rating. It scores 2.5 out of 5 from 20 reviews, nine of them in the last twelve months, and it is unclaimed. Twenty reviews is not a sample, and the profile sits on the main novuna.co.uk domain, which covers consumer credit, personal loans and vehicle solutions as well as business finance. There is no novunabusinessfinance.co.uk profile at all; that URL returns a 404.

Presenting a 20-review consumer score as a business finance rating would be a straightforward misrepresentation, so we have left it out of the key facts. What we can say is that Novuna publishes a collections contact and hours for customers in difficulty, 03433 519 319 and an email address, staffed 8:45 to 17:15 Monday to Thursday and 8:45 to 16:45 on Friday. A lender that publishes a route to a human when payments go wrong is doing something most do not.

Awards are on the site, including Business Moneyfacts 2024, Asset Finance Connect 2024, the Credit Strategy Credit Awards 2024 and a Leasing World Gold Award for 2023. Take them for what trade awards are worth. You may also see Novuna described as the UK's fifth largest asset finance provider; that ranking is third-party, dated 2024, and we do not repeat it as current.

How a deal reaches Novuna

Both routes are open. Novuna runs direct enquiry forms on its own site and a dedicated broker channel with an online proposal system called Mercury, which handles submission and tracking. Divisional commentary reported in the trade press for the year to March 2025 attributed growth to a 20% rise in its commercial broker business alongside expansion of direct channels, and put Business Finance new business volumes at £760.7m with a portfolio around £1.9bn. Those divisional figures come from trade reporting of a Novuna release rather than from a page we could open on novuna.co.uk, whose news index would not render for us, so treat them as indicative and dated.

In practice the deciding factor is whether you clear the three year bar and the deposit. If you do, a broker submission through Mercury and a direct application land in the same underwriting team, and the value of the broker route is that the same proposal goes to other funders at the same time.