Merchant Cash Advance Lenders UK 2026: Reviews

This page tracks every lender associated with UK merchant cash advances, who still writes them and who has moved on, with their published criteria pulled from their own sites on 1 September 2026 and a full review of each one. If a lender changes its criteria or leaves the market, this table changes with it.

The market is smaller than the listicles say

Search for “best merchant cash advance UK” and you will find pages listing six or seven providers as if they all still sell the same product. Checked against the lenders' own sites, that picture is out of date. Capify's current site no longer lists a merchant cash advance anywhere: its old MCA URLs return errors or serve invoice-payment content, and its page sitemap contains no merchant cash advance pages at all. Nucleus now sells a revenue-based loan repaid by fixed weekly direct debit, which is a different animal from a card split. iwoca says it outright: “We've stopped doing revenue based loans.”

What remains as the mainstream card-split market is three names. YouLend, the embedded giant behind the funding offers inside Dojo, Shopify, eBay, Amazon and Just Eat. 365 Finance, the phone-first direct lender. Liberis, the embedded provider you meet inside Worldpay, Elavon and eBay offers. A fourth, Lovey (the lender formerly named Love Finance), lists an MCA but publishes no criteria for it. That is the real field, and it is why we bothered building this page: most of what ranks for these searches was written before the market thinned out.

The lenders, compared

Figures below are each lender's own published numbers, read from their sites on 1 September 2026, with Trustpilot scores from the same day. Where a lender publishes nothing, we say so rather than fill the gap. None of the six publishes factor rates.

YouLend does not publish minimum trading or turnover criteria; the bands shown are what we have seen on real applications. Lovey's trading and turnover figures are from its business loan criteria because it publishes none for the MCA. Capify and Nucleus rows show their current flagship products, which are loans rather than card splits.

Our full lender reviews

Each review runs long because the detail is where advances go wrong: the sweep percentage, the minimum-payment clauses, the personal guarantee, what happens in a quiet month. Three of these lenders are on our panel and reviewed from the applications we handle. The others are reviewed from their published terms, Companies House filings and Trustpilot patterns, and we say which method applies on each page.

• YouLend review — the embedded giant, usually the price to beat
• 365 Finance review — phone-first, 16% sweep cap, funds nightclubs
• Liberis review — the advance inside Worldpay and eBay offers, and the 3% clause to read first
• Lovey review — Love Finance renamed, strong reviews, unpublished MCA terms
• Nucleus review — revenue-based loans by weekly direct debit
• Capify review — what its site sells now that the MCA pages are gone

For a ranked view with our reasoning, see our best MCA providers page, and for the head-to-head most businesses actually face, YouLend vs 365 Finance.

The other pairings people ask us about are written up the same way: YouLend vs Liberis, YouLend vs Capify, 365 Finance vs Liberis and Capify vs 365 Finance. If you have an offer in hand, the cost calculator has a version pre-set for each lender, and if a lender has already said no, the alternatives pages for YouLend, 365 Finance and Liberis set out who else funds the same profile.

Who has left the MCA market

Market exits matter because stale roundups send businesses to products that no longer exist, and every wasted application costs days. Three worth knowing about. Capify's merchant cash advance has disappeared from its site: the merchant-loans URL now returns a “gone” response and the product list leads with small business loans of £10,000 to £3 million. Nucleus retired the card-split repayment in favour of fixed weekly direct debits on its revenue-based loan. iwoca shut its revenue-based product entirely and points customers at its Flexi-Loan, which our colleagues have reviewed separately. If you see any of these three described as a current UK MCA provider, check the date on the page you are reading.

Fixed-repayment alternatives

An MCA is rarely the cheapest money available; it wins on speed, approval odds and repayments that fall when takings fall. If your revenue is steady and you want a lower total cost, a fixed-term product deserves a look before you sign an advance. Start with our reviews of iwoca's Flexi-Loan and Funding Circle's term loans, then use the MCA cost calculator to put the two shapes of repayment side by side. Our plain-English MCA explainer covers how the product works if you are starting from scratch, and factor rates explained shows how to compare a factor rate with an APR without being misled by either.

Where advances sit on our panel

A card-split advance is one shape of unsecured money, not a category of its own. Our unsecured panel runs to 55 lenders across 135 products, part of 200+ lenders overall (checked September 2026), and the MCA writers above are a small corner of it. That matters when an advance is declined or priced badly, because the term-loan and credit-line alternatives sit on the same panel and the same enquiry.

The panel data also puts the eligibility talk in proportion. At £​25,000, 36 lenders have a product that covers the amount, over terms from 1 to 72 months, with published rates spanning 4.1% to 70.8% and a median floor of 19.2% (checked September 2026). Those are product ceilings and floors across the panel, not an offer. On credit, 24 of the unsecured lenders accept minor adverse older than 24 months and 8 will look at moderate adverse; 21 will lend under a year of trading, and 39 do not require a director who owns a home (checked September 2026). Panel composition changes with every pull, so treat these as a guide.

How we keep this page current

Every figure on this page carries a checked date. We re-read each lender's public criteria, Trustpilot score and Companies House record quarterly, and sooner when a lender announces a change. The last full pass was 1 September 2026. Where our introductions desk sees lender behaviour shift between passes, the relevant review is updated first and this table follows. If you spot a figure a lender has changed before we have, tell us through the contact page and we will verify and correct it.

Sources and method

Every lender figure on this page was read from that lender's own published pages, with Trustpilot scores and Companies House records taken on the same day. Nothing here is a rate card: none of the six publishes a factor rate, so we say so rather than estimate one. Panel counts were checked September 2026, available products only.

1. YouLend merchants and FAQ pages, read 1 September 2026 and re-read 7 September 2026, for the up-to-£2,000,000 ceiling and the single fixed fee
2. 365 Finance merchant cash advance and FAQ pages, read 1 September 2026, for the £10,000 to £500,000 range, the six-month trading floor, the £10,000 monthly card takings floor and the 5% to 15% repayment share
3. Liberis explore-funding page and the Opayo partner-channel product page, read 1 and 7 September 2026, for the £2,500 to £300,000 partner range and the 3% monthly minimum clause
4. Capify page sitemap and legacy merchant cash advance URLs, status-checked 7 September 2026: /finance/merchant-loans/ returns HTTP 410 and the old cash-advance URLs redirect to invoice-payment content
5. Nucleus Commercial Finance revenue-based loans page, read 1 and 7 September 2026, for the fixed weekly direct debit that replaced the card split
6. Lovey business loans and merchant cash advance pages, read 1 and 7 September 2026, which list an advance but publish no criteria for it
7. Trustpilot review pages for each lender, all read 1 September 2026, for the scores and review counts in the table
8. Companies House records for the six lenders, used to confirm the trading entity behind each brand

Frequently asked questions