ThinCats review 2026: £1m to £30m, now inside Shawbrook

Who owns ThinCats now

Thincats Limited, Companies House 09707863, was incorporated on 29 July 2015 and traded as ESF Capital Limited until 4 October 2022. Its privacy notice now lists it among “Shawbrook Bank Limited and its wholly owned subsidiaries”, alongside Bluestone Mortgages, The Mortgage Lender, JBR Capital and Imployapp Limited, which trades as Playter. The registered office moved to Floor 10, 40 Leadenhall Street, London on 10 July 2026, leaving 2 Snowhill in Birmingham behind.

The senior team changed at the same time. ThinCats' own announcement of completion says “Amany Attia, CEO, and Ravi Anand, MD, will be stepping away from the business”, with chief commercial officer Mike Hackett quoted in their place. Losing both of the people most associated with a lender in the same week is worth knowing about if your view of ThinCats was formed by dealing with them.

There is one piece of company history that causes confusion, so it is worth clearing up. Business Loan Network Limited (07248014, incorporated 10 May 2010), the entity behind the original ThinCats peer-to-peer platform, is in liquidation. That is not the lender described on this page. The retail P2P proposition is long gone and today's ThinCats is an institutionally funded mid-market lender inside a bank.

What ThinCats lends, and to whom

Four propositions sit on the funding solutions page: funding for owner-managed businesses, Transitional Capital, funding for private equity backed companies, and healthcare funding. The listed uses are mergers and acquisitions, employee ownership trusts, buy-and-build, management buy-outs, growth capital, working capital and search funds. Owner-managed funding runs £1m to £30m over up to seven years, with leverage of up to four times EBITDA on cashflow loans and a maximum 85% loan to value on asset-backed loans.

Transitional Capital is the more distinctive product. It runs £5m to £30m, provides leverage on day one of up to four times structuring EBITDA, and is described as being on “a fixed rate return basis with no requirement for equity/warrants, with the shareholders benefitting from 100% of the upside”. It uses a mix of cash interest and PIK with a back-ended repayment profile, which is a polite way of saying the debt balance grows during the term. ThinCats states that clearly on the product page. It does not frame it as a risk, and a borrower should.

The other two propositions are narrower. Private equity backed funding is aimed at sponsors financing portfolio companies, and healthcare funding is the one sector ThinCats singles out with its own route. Both sit inside the same £1m to £30m band. What holds the four together is event-driven lending: this is money for a transaction with a date on it, whether that is a buy-out completing, an employee ownership trust being established or a bolt-on acquisition exchanging, rather than a facility a business takes because trading is tight. ThinCats also reports that “Over 70% of our clients secure further facilities with ThinCats”, which fits a buy-and-build client base coming back for the next deal rather than a one-off borrower.

Around three quarters of new lending is cashflow rather than asset-backed, by ThinCats' own account, which in practice means the security package is typically a debenture over the business rather than a charge on a specific asset. The security arrangements are not described anywhere on the site, and neither is any personal guarantee position. Underwriting runs through a proprietary model called PRISM, which ThinCats says draws on over two billion data points from every UK mid-sized business that has traded since 2007 and more than 200 metrics.

Why a small business is in the wrong place here

The floor is £1m of initial funding. The stated target is a business with between £0.5m and £40m of gross assets. Those two facts together rule out most of the enquiries that reach a broker in a normal week.

The routing tells the same story. ThinCats' homepage call to action is written for intermediaries: “If you are a professional adviser or private equity investor looking to arrange funding for a mid-sized business, get in touch.” This is a lender that expects a corporate finance adviser or a private equity house on the other side of the deal, with a model, a data room and a structure already drafted. It is not built to take an application from a business owner with last year's accounts and a hope.

There is a second consequence of that routing worth naming. Because deals arrive through advisers, the cost of getting to an answer is measured in adviser fees and weeks rather than in an online form, and a business that has not already appointed a corporate finance adviser will usually need one before ThinCats can look at anything seriously. That is standard at this size and it is still a real cost to plan for.

If your requirement is under £1m, the honest answer is that ThinCats is not a fit at any price and you are better served by the lenders on our business loans hub, or by asset finance if the money is going into equipment. We would rather say that in one paragraph than take you through a form first.

What it costs, which nobody outside a deal knows

ThinCats publishes no rate, no fee scale and no representative example anywhere on its website. Not a headline margin, not an arrangement fee, not an exit fee, not an early-settlement position. The only pricing language on the whole site is the Transitional Capital description of a fixed rate return with a mix of cash interest and PIK.

That is normal at this end of the market, where every facility is negotiated around a specific structure, and it is also a real limitation. A borrower cannot compare ThinCats with anyone before engaging, which means the comparison happens after weeks of adviser time. Build that into the timetable and get a term sheet early.

No time-to-decision or time-to-funds claim is published either. The nearest things to a speed claim are “Provide fast turnaround for follow on funding” and “Fast and agile, allowing business owners to capitalise on opportunities”, neither of which is quantified. ThinCats also runs an anti-fraud page warning that it does not cold-call to offer funding and does not ask prospective customers to pay upfront fees, which is a useful thing to have said and was last updated in February 2026.

Scale, funding and what the accounts show

ThinCats originated £348m in 2025 against £335m in 2024, and reports more than £2.3bn lent cumulatively with £700m of assets under management as at January 2026. Transitional Capital has deployed over £200m cumulatively, £54m of it in 2025. Two thirds of the first £2bn went to businesses outside London and over a quarter of the funding was used to finance acquisitions, which is a fair description of where this lender is actually useful.

The funding structure behind that is a warehouse facility with Citi and Barclays Bank PLC, supported by a British Business Bank ENABLE Guarantee, which ThinCats says supports lending of up to £696m. Citi and Barclays provide the senior funding, ThinCats provides junior funding from its own capital with a small portion from a UK credit fund, and the company describes it as one of the largest dedicated funding lines with a non-bank lender. It was announced in September 2023 and is the second ENABLE transaction ThinCats has done.

The last filed accounts for Thincats Limited cover the year to 30 June 2024 and predate the Shawbrook deal. They show turnover of £27.1m against £19.3m in the prior period and a loss before tax of £24.2m, with an average of 100 full-time staff. The loss is driven by £22.3m of interest payable and a £7.4m impairment charge rather than by trading, and the going concern basis was adopted on the strength of parent support, with £133.0m owed to the parent and repayable on demand. Those figures were read by OCR from a scanned filing, so treat them as the filed accounts say rather than to the penny. The year end has since moved to 31 December to line up with Shawbrook, and the next accounts were due at the end of September 2026 and not yet filed when we checked.