YouLend vs Capify: a card sweep against a fixed repayment

Who YouLend actually is

YouLend sells one idea very hard: money now against a share of what you sell later. The trading entity is YouLend Limited, company 12576377, incorporated in April 2020 and run from 90 High Holborn, and its own pages date the founding to 2016 on the about page and 2015 on the impact page. The group accounts to 31 March 2025, filed on 9 December 2025, show revenue of £171.5 million against £118.7 million the year before, and profit of £8.8 million against £1.2 million. The ultimate controlling party in those accounts is EQT, the Swedish private equity house, through BC Midco Pte. Ltd in Singapore.

You will mostly meet it without meeting it. YouLend is the funder behind Dojo's core business funding, Amazon's UK seller advance and its Flexible Financing Line, eBay, Just Eat Takeaway.com, Teya and Worldline from January 2026, and the advances inside Lopay, Epos Now, Tide, Foodhub, Mews, Nory, OnBuy, Qonto, myPOS and Upwork. The homepage claims 370,000-plus businesses funded and 300-plus partners, and a January 2024 private securitisation with J.P. Morgan to extend £4 billion.

The regulatory position is worth reading properly, because it is often reported wrong. YouLend Limited holds an FCA payment-institution licence, FRN 947287, granted on 29 June 2023. That licence covers the settlement account your card money passes through on its way to repaying the advance. The financing agreement is not FCA-regulated, and YouLend's own regulatory page says so. Our YouLend review takes the application apart step by step.

Who Capify actually is

Capify runs from First Floor Hamilton House on Church Street in Altrincham, which is already a difference in temperament from a High Holborn fintech. The business started in the UK in 2008, out of the American lender AmeriMerchant, and rebranded to Capify in 2015. Its own homepage claims over £1.2 billion funded and more than 20,000 businesses supported, with customers renewing three times on average. The invoice finance page says 100,000-plus UK businesses funded, which does not agree with the homepage, and we would take the smaller number.

The corporate identity needs a footnote. Capify's footer says the trademark is licensed to United Kapital Limited (06575165) and “Capify Uk Limited (Company Number 10183728)”. Companies House registers 10183728 as Capify Limited, incorporated 17 May 2016 and previously called United Kapital Newco Limited. Capify UK Limited is a different company, 11715963, incorporated in December 2018. Our own review repeated the footer's pairing until this check; it is fixed now. None of this changes the lending, but the company that will sue you and the company named on your agreement should match, and it is worth reading the front page of the contract for which one it is.

Behind the lending sits a £100 million facility from Pollen Street Capital agreed in April 2024, which replaced a £75 million line from Goldman Sachs taken in 2019. Capify carries no FCA authorisation statement anywhere on its site, terms or privacy pages, which is normal for commercial lending to limited companies and means the agreement is the only protection on offer. Our Capify review has the product menu in full.

The advance Capify stopped selling to you

Here is what the site does now, checked with a browser and a status code rather than read off a comparison page. Capify's page sitemap contains no merchant cash advance URL. /finance/merchant-loans/ returns HTTP 410, the code a site uses to say a page is gone deliberately. /cash-advance/ and /merchant-cash-advance/ both redirect to the supplier invoice payment product. The product menu runs from small business loans through secured loans, cash flow loans, bad-credit loans, bridging, commercial mortgages, supplier invoice payment, asset finance and debt refinancing, with no advance among them.

Then there is the broker page, which the sitemap dates to 17 August 2026 and which still reads: Capify's merchant cash advance lets a business raise up to £500,000 and repay through a percentage of daily card payments. That is either live copy for the intermediary channel or copy nobody deleted, and we cannot tell which from outside. We say “withdrawn from the direct site” rather than “gone” for that reason. A broker asking Capify for a card-split deal in September 2026 may still get one; a business owner reading capify.co.uk will not be offered one.

The other tell is on 365 Finance's site, which hosts a Capify-branded quote page with a Capify marketplace address on it. That is the shape a referral takes when a lender no longer wants a product but still wants the enquiry to land somewhere. If your reason for approaching Capify was the advance specifically, the honest route is to compare the lenders still writing it, which is what our merchant cash advance hub is for.

What you pay, and why neither will tell you first

Neither publishes a rate. YouLend's line is no interest, one fixed fee, and the only public illustration we could find is one reproduced by BusinessExpert in August 2026: a £15,000 advance with a £1,500 fee, £16,500 repaid. That is a 10% fee on one example, and it is not a price list. Capify's FAQ says it uses a factor rate based on risk to set the total payback and the term, and publishes no rate at all for the loan products. Any third-party page quoting a Capify APR is guessing.

Capify does publish one price, and it deserves the credit. The supplier invoice facility costs 4% of the invoice over 30 days repaid daily, or 5% repaid weekly, 8% or 10% over 60 days, and 12% or 15% over 90 days, plus a processing fee per facility and per invoice. Do the annualised arithmetic on 4% for 30 days before treating it as cheap. It is priced as a bridge from a stock purchase to a selling season, and it reads badly as a rolling habit.

One thing that does move the price on a Capify deal is who introduced you. Its broker page describes a buy rate scheme where an intermediary can earn a margin by selling above the rate Capify offered, which means the customer's price moves with the broker's margin. We think that is worth knowing before you accept a Capify quote from anyone. YouLend's FAQ takes the other approach: it may pay a third party who introduced you a commission, typically a percentage of the fixed fee, and that percentage does not change what you pay. Our guide to factor rates against APR explains why a fixed fee over nine months is not an interest rate.

Whose credit file gets read by a person

This is the real division. YouLend's homepage says it approves nine out of ten applicants, and the 91% and 84% figures that appear on older pages, ours included, come from Plaid's customer story about YouLend rather than from youlend.com. Those are high numbers because the decision is largely automated on data the platform already holds, and automated decisions are fast in both directions. A satisfied county court judgment or a director with a rough two years does not get explained to an algorithm.

Capify sells the opposite. It has run a bad-credit business loans page for years, it publishes no approval rate at all, and its FAQ describes underwriting that starts with 12 months of business bank statements and owner identification rather than a score. The detail we find most telling is that the credit check is pulled only at submission, once terms have been accepted, and that brokers can get indicative offers with no search made. A business collecting quotes can therefore see a Capify number without adding a footprint, which is not true everywhere.

The floors work the other way round. Capify publishes 12 months of trading and £10,000 a month of turnover, and both are real. YouLend publishes nothing, and what we see on the desk is roughly three months of trading and about £1,500 a month of card sales, which MerchantSavvy and BusinessExpert both report as well. So a nine-month-old cafe with clean directors goes to YouLend and gets nowhere with Capify, while a four-year-old garage with a scarred file goes to Capify and gets a polite automated no from YouLend. On guarantees, Capify publishes that every product requires one, usually from the majority shareholder or a combination of shareholders; YouLend publishes nothing and the directors sign one in the agreements we arrange. Our personal guarantee guide sets out what that commits someone to.

How fast the money lands

Both make aggressive claims and both are roughly honest about them. YouLend: approval in as little as 24 hours, funds in as little as 48 hours after approval, and 24 hours through partner channels. Capify: eligibility in 30 seconds on the homepage, a conditional approval in 60 seconds on the loan page, same-day approvals and funding possible in 24 hours, stretching to 24 to 48 hours on secured deals, with an application described as around ten minutes.

What actually decides the date is different in each case. YouLend needs your card terminals pointing at the settlement account it operates under its payment-institution licence, because the payment account terms make that a condition of financing. A single-terminal Dojo merchant clears that in an afternoon; a business with three acquirers across two sites does not. Capify has no rerouting to do, so the delay moves to the paperwork, and its own FAQ implies as much by putting the credit search after acceptance rather than before it.

The bit nobody mentions

Capify will not stack. Its FAQ says it can fund a business that already has a competitor loan only once more than 50% of that loan is repaid, and that it pays the competitor out rather than running alongside them. That is a genuinely protective rule and it is also a lock-in: once Capify has paid out your last lender, the easiest facility to arrange next year is the Capify renewal, and renewals are the house speciality by its own count of three per customer. Decide each one on the number rather than the convenience.

On the YouLend side, the FY25 accounts show £152.4 million of senior loan notes from a related party under common control, secured on the assets of YL VI Limited. That is the group funding itself through its owner, which is a legitimate structure and also the reason the lender named on your agreement is a YL subsidiary rather than YouLend Limited. Separately, YouLend US LLC had a network intrusion between 5 and 9 June 2026 involving US customer data, with notification letters in July. It is a US entity and we have seen nothing suggesting UK merchant data was involved, but the headline travels further than the detail so we would rather write it down.

The last one is a complaint pattern rather than a term. Capify replies to every negative Trustpilot review, which we like, and the recurring theme in those reviews is marketing contact that carried on after the customer asked it to stop. Sixty-six reviews in the last twelve months on a 4.7 average is a quiet profile compared with YouLend's 12,426, so read the Capify tail rather than the score.

Worked examples

Neither publishes a rate card, so the 12% fee on the YouLend side is our assumption, chosen only to make the arithmetic visible. Capify publishes no factor rate at all, so its example carries no cost figure: what it shows is the shape of the schedule. Swap in the numbers from your own offer.

Who fits where

Profiles of the sort that reach us, matched against the criteria each lender publishes. The middle column is the door that fits, which is not the same as a recommendation.

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