365 Finance vs Liberis: the lender you choose against the one your platform chose

Who 365 Finance actually is

365 Finance is the trading name of 365 Business Finance Limited, company 08267810, incorporated on 25 October 2012 and run from Manor House on Soho Square. It calls itself a direct financial provider, which is the useful distinction: it lends its own money rather than plugging a lending engine into somebody else's checkout. Warren Abbey took over as chief executive in April 2024, having joined the year before as chief commercial officer, and founder Andrew Raphaely remains on the board.

The published numbers are unusually complete for this market. Advances of £10,000 to £500,000, raised from a £400,000 ceiling in 2024. Repayment as a share of card sales, typically between 5% and 15%. Trading for at least six months with average card sales of at least £10,000 a month. Twelve months of card statements requested at application, a soft search once approved, and no credit check at all to get a provisional quote. Typical payoff in five to ten months, no fixed end date, no extra charge if it runs long, and no application, admin or late fees. Compare that with what most of this sector puts in public and it is close to generous.

Behind it sits a £150 million senior secured facility from Pollen Street Capital agreed on 25 February 2025, supporting more than £300 million of originations a year, with a euro line funding the Irish business that launched the same month at €10,000 to €250,000. On recognition: a King's Award for Enterprise for Innovation in 2024 for the Rev&U underwriting platform, Best Fintech Lender at the Lending Awards 2025, and SME Lender of the Year at the Credit Awards 2025. One caveat we would rather write down than leave out: 365 holds no FCA permissions of its own and its collections run through a Modulr electronic-money account, which is safeguarded rather than covered by the compensation scheme. Our 365 Finance review walks through an application.

Who Liberis actually is

Liberis Limited was incorporated on 14 December 2005, which makes it older than everything else in this market, though its partner pages date the business to 2007. It works at Scale Space on Wood Lane and its explore-funding page says £2 billion has been funded to 64,128 small businesses as at June 2026. The homepage still carries a £1bn figure in one corner, so the site disagrees with itself; nowhere does it claim more than £2 billion, and any page saying £3 billion, including an earlier version of our own, was wrong.

The model is the point. Liberis scores merchants from data their platform already holds and surfaces a pre-assessed offer inside that platform's dashboard. Worldpay Business Finance is Liberis. So is Elavon's funding in the UK, the US and, since March 2026, Canada, along with Barclaycard, Lopay's Flex Capital, Deliveroo Capital from January 2026, Vagaro, Opayo, eBay's Flexible Growth Financing from 6 April 2026, and Dojo Flex Funds from 26 February 2026. There are five products now rather than one: Starter Capital up to £50,000 with no transaction history needed, Pay with Liberis up to £10,000, Working Capital up to £1 million, Flex Capital revolving to a £2 million limit, and Investment Capital by arrangement.

The corporate news matters for anyone planning to renew. On 18 June 2026 Nordic Capital agreed to acquire Liberis and combine it with Qred, a licensed Swedish small-business bank, with completion expected later in 2026, Qred's Emil Sunvisson as group chief executive and Blenheim Chalcot exiting after years as lead investor. A live agreement is unaffected: the contract you signed is the contract. A second or third renewal, though, would be with a differently owned company selling a different product set. In its own footer wording Liberis is not authorised or regulated by the FCA, the Financial Ombudsman Service cannot consider a complaint about it, and it is a registered EMD agent of Modulr. Our Liberis review has the partner map in detail.

What each one tells you before you sign

This is where the two genuinely differ, and it is not the difference the marketing sells. 365 publishes a repayment band of typically 5% to 15% of card sales, a trading floor of six months, a card-sales floor of £10,000 a month, a document list of 12 months of card statements, and a typical payoff of five to ten months. From those five figures you can size your own offer before you speak to anybody. We did exactly that in the worked example below, and it tells you something an underwriter would otherwise tell you a week later.

Liberis publishes its terms channel by channel, and the channels do not agree. The direct range is £1,000 to £1 million. Opayo says £2,500 to £300,000 with four months of card transactions and more than £2,500 a month. Elavon phrases the same floor as at least ten transactions totalling £2,500 a month, or twelve months of evidence if you have recently switched acquirer. Dojo Flex Funds carries two different sets of numbers, £1,000 a month and four months of trading on Dojo's own page against £60,000 a year and twelve months in the launch release. None of that is dishonest, but it means the answer to “what are the Liberis criteria” is: which door are you standing at.

One published Liberis term has no equivalent at 365 at all, and it is the one worth reading twice. The business must operate so that Liberis receives a minimum monthly amount of up to 3% of the total owed. The explore-funding footnote, new this year, says up to 3% of the receivables purchased and adds that any shortfall may be collected by direct debit. Opayo's terms drop the “up to” and state a flat 3%. Worldpay's Liberis FAQ adds that stopping trading for more than seven days without telling Liberis may bring the collections team into it. 365 publishes no monthly floor of any kind, and its FAQ says the cost does not increase however long the advance takes to repay.

What you actually pay

Neither publishes a rate. 365 describes a single all-inclusive cost with no application fees, admin charges or late fees, fixed at the start and unchanged by how long repayment runs. Liberis says one fixed fee, and adds a mechanic worth understanding: you choose the amount and the split percentage, and that pair sets the fee. A harder split repays faster and, in the offers we see, prices lower. A gentler split costs more. Nobody explains that trade-off in the dashboard, so it is easy to pick the comfortable split and pay for the comfort without noticing.

Early settlement is where Liberis is clearer and 365 is silent. Liberis publishes that after 14 days there are no early-payment fees but the fixed fee still applies in full, so paying faster saves nothing, and Worldpay adds a 14-day right to change your mind after funding at no charge. 365 publishes nothing on early settlement, though the same logic follows from a fee fixed at the start. What 365 does publish, and Liberis does not, is that there are no late fees, which is a different sort of comfort.

The bigger cost point is structural. A Liberis offer is priced inside one platform from that platform's data, and the same business can be shown different Liberis numbers through Worldpay and through Elavon. Nothing in the convenience of a pre-approved figure tells you whether a direct lender would have priced the same card turnover better. On the deals our desk compares, the spread between the best and worst fee quoted on identical card volume is wide enough to matter to a small business. Our factor rate against APR guide covers why a fee percentage and an interest rate are not the same animal.

Who gets approved, and what it does to your file

Both approve at high rates, for opposite reasons. 365 publishes over 90% of applications approved, which is an underwriting-desk number: enquiries that fail the six-month or £10,000-a-month floor never reach it. Liberis publishes no site-wide rate, but Dojo Flex Funds quotes 90% and a Vagaro case study 95%, and those are high because the platform pre-scored you from transaction data before the offer appeared.

The credit footprint is the sharpest practical difference on this page. 365 runs no credit check at all for a provisional quote, and a soft search once approved. Liberis's Opayo FAQ says it runs company and consumer credit bureau searches that leave a record on both files, visible to other finance providers. For a director with a mortgage application or another facility coming up in the next few months, that is a real cost attached to accepting an offer that looked free to look at.

On sector, 365 is the more flexible of the two on paper, because it underwrites card-present trade and has spent years in hospitality: its April 2026 release reports 43% more restaurants and 39% more pubs and bars funded in the first quarter of 2026 than a year earlier. Liberis's reach depends on which partners hold your account, which is why a hairdresser on Vagaro and a takeaway on Deliveroo can both meet it and a wholesaler with no consumer platform never will. On guarantees, Liberis publishes that it asks limited companies and LLPs for a personal guarantee; 365 asks for one but does not publish the scope, and our guarantee guide explains what to look for in the wording.

How fast the money lands

365 publishes approval within 24 hours and funding in as little as 24 hours, with a page promising unsecured finance in less than 48. Liberis publishes as little as 24 hours, backed by a firmer figure: 70% of merchants were funded within one working day of approval in 2025, and its partner page claims one in five deals completes within four hours. Opayo says two working days from approval.

The thing that slows 365 is the phone call. Underwriting starts after a conversation with the account manager, and a director who cannot be reached is the commonest reason a 48-hour deal becomes a four-day one. The thing that slows Liberis is nothing, when the offer is embedded in your acquirer, because there is no data to gather and no terminal to reroute. That is the honest advantage of the embedded model and we would not pretend otherwise.

The bit nobody mentions

Both of these lenders collect through Modulr. 365 says plainly that it uses a Modulr electronic-money account for services it is not itself authorised to provide, and Liberis is a registered EMD agent of the same firm. Neither account is a bank account with compensation-scheme cover; both are safeguarded e-money accounts, which is entirely normal for a repayment account and no place to leave a balance sitting.

The second point is about what a renewal will look like. Liberis allows renewal of Working Capital from 50% paid down, which is generous, and by the time a 2026 borrower reaches a second renewal the company behind the paper is likely to be part of a Nordic Capital group with a Swedish bank at its centre. 365 is independent and funded by a facility that runs on a relationship dating to 2018, so the renewal conversation next year is likely to be with the same account manager about the same product. Neither of those is a virtue in itself. They are just different kinds of predictability.

Third, and this is the one we repeat most often on the phone: a pre-approved figure is a marketing artefact as much as a credit decision. It exists because your platform wants the revenue share, it appears at a moment engineered to catch you, and it usually comes with a countdown. That does not make it a bad offer. It makes it an unexamined one, and an hour spent getting a second number is the cheapest hour in the whole process.

Worked examples

Neither lender publishes a rate card, so the 12% fee below is our assumption, picked to make the two columns comparable rather than because either company quoted it. The split percentages and the card takings are ours too. What is not assumed is the 3% floor and the 5% to 15% band, which are both published.

Who fits where

Profiles of the kind that reach us, set against the criteria each lender publishes. The middle column is which door fits, not what anyone ought to do.

General information on how the lenders differ, not a recommendation. We arrange finance; the lender decides, and you choose.