Praetura Asset Finance review 2026, hire purchase, finance lease and refinance from Blackburn

What Praetura Asset Finance lends

The funding solutions page keeps to three structures. Hire purchase lets a business own the asset at the end while spreading the cost, with flexible deposits, a fixed schedule of payments and seasonal patterns where the trade needs them; the page notes the interest can be set against pre-tax profits. A finance lease gives use of the asset without ownership, the payments treated as a trading expense, with a choice of options when the primary period ends. Asset refinance raises money against machinery, equipment or vehicles a business already owns, for growth, for consolidating borrowing or for clearing HMRC arrears, and the common questions page extends it to management buy-outs and buy-ins.

Deal size is typically £7,500 to £2,000,000 net of VAT, and the lender says it will look either side of those thresholds on the individual case. Kit from several suppliers can sit on one agreement where it all arrives in a similar window, repayments go by direct debit from a business account, monthly in most cases, and early settlement is allowed with a settlement figure that normally includes a rebate of interest. The schedule is fixed for the repayment period save for a change in government tax or VAT.

The assets page reads like a yard inventory: vans, lorries and trucks, buses, coaches and minibuses, motorhomes and campervans, tractors and trailers, company cars and classic, luxury or performance cars, yellow plant, farming and forestry equipment, engineering, manufacturing and industrial machinery, and printing and packaging lines. Custom-built horseboxes, brewery kit and fairground rides appear as examples of the less usual, and the common questions page adds London black cabs, excavators, dump trucks, crushers and woodworking machinery. Anyone weighing asset finance for a hard asset with a resale market will find it on one of those lists.

Who Praetura Asset Finance lends to

Limited companies are the main customer, and the common questions page adds sole traders, partnerships, PLCs and public bodies. Six sectors are named on the assets page, construction, agriculture and forestry, manufacturing, printing, transport and waste and recycling, and the lender says the list is far from exhaustive and that it welcomes other trades. The 2013 team page describes the firm at launch as the first independently owned asset finance company to enter the UK market in 15 years, which is still the basis of how it presents itself to brokers.

Distribution runs through brokers, accountants and auditors as well as direct from businesses, and the sales side is organised regionally, with 5 regional sales directors and business development managers under a national sales director. Registered introducers use the broker portal, which is the same portal Kingsway Asset Finance, another group company, runs.

The group behind it is broader than one product. Praetura Commercial Finance in Wilmslow offers confidential invoice discounting, a stock revolver, plant and machinery term loans, property term loans and cash flow term loans as asset based lending; Praetura Invoice Finance and Zodeq cover invoice finance; Kingsway Asset Finance covers business loans and soft assets; and Praetura Ventures provides equity to early-stage companies, two thirds of its portfolio in the North of England. Praetura Lending, the group's debt side, passed a £500m loan book on 11 December 2024.

How an application runs

A broker submits the proposal through the portal, or an enquiry comes in by email or phone to the Blackburn office, with the asset, the supplier and the business's accounts. The lender then draws up a schedule of payments for the agreed structure, hire purchase, finance lease or refinance, and once the agreement is signed the supplier is paid or, on a refinance, the money is released to the business while it keeps using the equipment. Payments start by direct debit on the agreed date.

Two features of the published process matter in practice. Seasonal payment profiles are offered to businesses whose income swings through the year, farming and leisure being the obvious cases, and the lender will combine equipment from different suppliers into a single agreement so a fit-out with three invoices does not become three loans. Since October 2025, when the asset finance division recorded its highest lending, the group has also raised its funding lines, including the £150m NatWest facility of May 2026 for the commercial finance arm.

Through us the asset, the accounts and the purpose reach Praetura and the other panel lenders writing asset finance in one submission put together by a named case handler. We arrange the finance and Praetura assesses the case and makes its own decision. Enquiring does not affect your credit score.

Praetura Asset Finance on our panel

At September 2026 the 2 live Praetura products in our catalogue were 1 asset finance product sized £10,000 at the low end and £5m at the top, on terms of 1 month at the low end and 6 years at the top, and 1 secured business loan sized £120,000 at the low end and £5m at the top, on terms of 12 months at the low end and 6 years at the top. The asset span reaches past the £2m the lender prints as typical because it describes the product as we held it on that date rather than a single deal, and both figures move as products are added or withdrawn.

Around it, at September 2026 the panel carried 33 lender brands with a live product for construction plant, 32 for agricultural machinery, 31 for printing equipment, 30 for coaches and buses and 15 funding older machinery. Praetura's asset list puts it in every one of those. They are counts of brands holding at least one live product and say nothing about the lender's own criteria.