UK Merchant Cash Advance Lenders 2026: Reviews & Comparison

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 Checked against the lenders' own sites, that picture is out of date.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.

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.

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.

Frequently asked questions