YouLend alternatives: the UK competitors compared

365 Finance, iwoca, Capify, Funding Circle and Fleximize all sit alongside YouLend on our panel, and each publishes a different product shape. 365 Finance advances £10,000 to £500,000 against card takings. iwoca is a drawdown facility of £1,000 to £1,000,000 held for one day to five years. Capify sells instalment loans of £10,000 to £3,000,000, Funding Circle a fixed-term loan of £10,000 to £750,000 over six months to six years, and Fleximize the Flexiloan and Flexiloan Lite over 3 to 60 months. All of that was read on the lenders’ own sites on 9 September 2026.

For a card-split advance the closest YouLend competitor is 365 Finance, which writes the same product against daily card takings. For a business that would rather repay to a schedule, the names searched against YouLend are iwoca (a drawdown facility), Capify (daily or weekly instalments), Funding Circle (a fixed-term loan) and Fleximize (the Flexiloan). All five are on our panel alongside YouLend, and one enquiry through CapExpand is checked against every one of them at once, so you compare the offers rather than the marketing. Our separate YouLend review at capexpand.com/business-funding/merchant-cash-advance/youlend covers YouLend on its own.

YouLend is a London embedded-finance company that funds merchant cash advances through card processors and selling platforms rather than through branches. The UK trading company is YouLend Limited, Companies House 12576377, incorporated 28 April 2020 at 90 High Holborn, and it acts as agent for a set of lending subsidiaries, so the counterparty on an agreement can be a name such as YL VI Limited. The book is funded by a £4 billion private securitisation agreed with J.P. Morgan in January 2024, and the ultimate owner is the private equity group EQT.

No. YouLend Limited is authorised by the FCA as a payment institution under firm reference number 947287, granted 29 June 2023, and that permission covers the settlement accounts your card takings pass through while an advance is live. An advance to a limited company sits outside regulated consumer credit, so the protections are the contractual ones written into the agreement, which is a reason to read it before drawdown. You can check any firm at register.fca.org.uk.

Then a different published criterion is usually the way through. Every lender on the panel sets its own floors, and they sit a long way apart: at September 2026, 21 of our 55 unsecured lenders will consider a company trading under a year, and 24 accept a default or judgment that is settled or older than 24 months. One enquiry through CapExpand is checked against those criteria before anything is submitted, and each lender still decides its own case.

Enquiring does not affect your credit score. A lender may run its own credit search later if you go ahead with an application to it, and that happens with your consent, after you have seen the offer and decided to proceed.

One enquiry goes to the lenders on this page whose published criteria you meet, YouLend included, and the offers come back to you to choose between. Our service is free to you: the lender pays us, and each lender still makes its own decision.

Our unsecured panel currently holds 55 lenders, part of 200+ lenders across all products, and the full roster is published on our lender directory at capexpand.com/business-funding/lenders. One enquiry is checked against the lot, and we approach only the lenders whose criteria you fit. Figures checked September 2026, and panel composition changes over time.