YouLend vs Liberis: the two advances hiding inside your card platform

Who YouLend actually is

YouLend says it was born in 2016 on its about page, and 2015 on its impact page, and we are not going to referee that. The trading entity is YouLend Limited, company 12576377, incorporated in April 2020 and run from 90 High Holborn. The group accounts for the year to 31 March 2025, filed on 9 December 2025, show revenue of £171.5 million, up 45% on the £118.7 million of the year before, and a profit of £8.8 million against £1.2 million. The ultimate controlling party named in those accounts is EQT, the Swedish private equity house, through BC Midco Pte. Ltd in Singapore, which also makes Banking Circle a sister company under common control. YouLend does not put that on its merchant pages. We think it matters more than the marketing does, because a lender owned by a fund with an exit horizon behaves differently from a founder-run one, in pricing and in patience.

The product on youlend.com is called Capital: a revenue-based advance up to £2,000,000 with one fixed fee and no interest. Partner channels run lower; Dojo and eBay both quote up to £1 million. There is also an Instant Payouts product and a spend product, and the FY25 accounts mention a new revenue vertical that counts non-card sales when decisioning, which is how YouLend can fund an Amazon seller with no card terminal at all. YouLend Limited holds an FCA payment-institution licence (FRN 947287, granted 29 June 2023) covering the settlement accounts the repayments flow through, and its own regulatory page says the financing agreements are not FCA-regulated.

Scale: 370,000-plus businesses funded on the homepage, 300-plus partners, and a January 2024 private securitisation with J.P. Morgan to extend £4 billion. The 2026 news is a Berlin office, cash advance launches with Teya (15 January) and Worldline (19 January), a $225 million forward-flow facility from Värde Partners for US receivables in March, and a network intrusion at YouLend US LLC between 5 and 9 June 2026, a US entity holding US customer data. Our YouLend review has the application mechanics in detail.

Who Liberis actually is

Liberis Limited is older than every rival in this market: incorporated on 14 December 2005, company 05654231, registered at Scale Space on Wood Lane in London, and describing itself on partner pages as established in 2007. Its explore-funding page says £2 billion has been funded to 64,128 small businesses as of June 2026. The homepage still carries a £1bn figure in one corner, so the site disagrees with itself, but nowhere does it say more than £2 billion. Rob Fairfield has been chief executive since August 2025.

The big news is ownership. 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 becomes group chief executive, Verdane co-invests, and Blenheim Chalcot, the lead investor since the early days, exits. The combined group is described as about 600 staff, over €250 million of revenue and 53,000 active small-business customers across 17 countries. For a borrower with a live agreement this changes nothing: the contract you signed is the contract. For a borrower looking at Liberis next year it may mean a different product set and a different renewal offer, because a bank-owned lender funds itself in ways a fintech cannot.

Liberis now lists five products rather than one. Starter Capital (up to £50,000, marketed with no transaction history needed), Pay with Liberis (a buy-now-pay-later line up to £10,000), Working Capital (the classic advance, from £500 a month in card sales, up to £1 million, with renewal from 50% paid down), Flex Capital (a revolving line with a £2 million limit, from £5,000 a month) and Investment Capital (custom, from £40,000 a month). The published direct range is £1,000 to £1 million. The £2,500 to £300,000 you will see on our own Liberis review and on most comparison sites is the Opayo partner channel, and it needs that label. Regulatory position, in Liberis's own footer wording: not authorised or regulated by the FCA, the Financial Ombudsman Service will not be able to consider a complaint about it, and it is a registered EMD agent of Modulr FS Limited (Liberis FRN 902157, Modulr FRN 900573) for the payments plumbing.

Which platform hands you which advance

Here is the map as of 7 September 2026, because it has changed twice this year and most pages, ours included, had not caught up. YouLend is behind Dojo's core business funding (Dojo's page says YouLend will carry out a soft search; the two passed £1 billion together in October 2024, and Dojo now quotes 20,000-plus businesses and £1bn-plus funded), Amazon's UK seller cash advance and its Flexible Financing Line (a pre-approved line drawn in small amounts with a fee per withdrawal, running since November 2023), Just Eat Takeaway.com (over €150 million across seven markets), Teya and Worldline (both January 2026), plus the cash advances inside Lopay, Epos Now, Tide, Foodhub, Mews, Nory, OnBuy, Qonto, myPOS and Upwork. Shopify appears on YouLend's Trustpilot profile but not on its UK pages, so we no longer list it with any confidence.

Liberis is behind Worldpay Business Finance (worldpay.com names Liberis; older write-ups including ours put Worldpay with YouLend, and that was wrong), Elavon in the UK, the US and, since March 2026, Canada, Barclaycard (a September 2026 Liberis post describes Barclaycard customers as eligible for Liberis funding), Lopay's Flex Capital, Deliveroo Capital (January 2026), Vagaro, Opayo, and eBay's Flexible Growth Financing, launched on 6 April 2026.

Two platforms carry both. eBay names YouLend and Liberis on the same help page, with financing up to £1 million and funds one to two business days after approval. And Dojo, which for years was a YouLend-only route, launched Dojo Flex Funds with Liberis on 26 February 2026: a revolving facility built on Liberis Starter Capital, quoting 90% approval and funds from week one, sitting alongside the YouLend lump-sum advance. A Dojo customer can now be offered both, under two different Dojo product names, and the terms are not the same. The lump sum has no published minimum monthly amount. Flex Funds is Liberis paper and carries Liberis terms.

Teya went the other way. Liberis's older partner lists include it, but Teya chose YouLend in January 2026. Platforms swap funders. The name in your dashboard this quarter is a matchmaking decision your platform made, and it can change before your renewal comes round.

What you actually pay

Neither publishes a rate card. YouLend's line is “no interest, pay only a single fixed fee”. Liberis says one fixed fee, and adds a mechanic worth knowing: you choose the amount and the split percentage, and that combination determines the funding fee. A bigger split repays faster and, in the offers we see, prices lower; a gentler split costs more. On YouLend the offers usually arrive as two or three amount-and-fee combinations and you pick one.

The one public YouLend number is an illustration reproduced by BusinessExpert in August 2026: a £15,000 advance with a £1,500 fee, £16,500 repaid, which is a 10% fee. We would not read that as a price list. Our review says where the structural edge sits: Dojo's volume earns its customers YouLend's sharpest pricing, and an application without a Dojo machine behind it lands nearer standard market levels. We have no equivalent view of Liberis's price ladder, because its offers are priced inside each partner platform from that platform's data, and the same business can be shown different Liberis numbers through Worldpay and through Elavon.

Early settlement is where Liberis is clearer. After 14 days there are no early-payment fees, but the fixed fee applies in full, so paying faster does not save money. Worldpay's Liberis FAQ also gives a 14-day right to change your mind after funding at no charge. YouLend publishes nothing on early settlement and nothing on default terms; both live in the agreement, not on the website. On commission, YouLend's FAQ says it may pay a third party who introduced you a commission, typically a percentage of the fixed fee. That is how we are paid on YouLend deals, and it does not change your price. Our factor rate versus APR guide explains why a 12% fee over nine months is not a 12% interest rate.

The 3% floor, with numbers on it

This is the clause that separates the two in a quiet month. Liberis's footer says the business must operate so that Liberis receives a minimum monthly amount of up to 3% of the total amount owed. The explore-funding footnote goes further, and this wording is new in 2026: up to 3% of the receivables purchased by Liberis, and “any shortfall may be collected by direct debit”. The Opayo terms drop the “up to” and say 3%.

Put figures on it. A £30,000 advance at an assumed 12% fee is £33,600 to repay. Three per cent of that is £1,008 a month, whatever the card machine did. At a 10% split you need £10,080 of card takings in the month to cover the floor from the split alone. Take £9,000 in a flooded January and the split collects £900, and the £108 gap is now something Liberis may take from your bank account rather than wait for. The Worldpay FAQ adds that if you stop trading for more than seven days without telling Liberis, the collections team may get in touch.

YouLend publishes no minimum monthly amount. Its Dojo and Lopay partner pages describe a typical nine-month repayment and a twelve-month maximum, which tells you the sweep is sized so a normal business clears it inside a year, but the website makes no promise about what happens when a business does not. Our review describes what we have seen in YouLend agreements, a switch to a minimum weekly manual payment if turnover collapses, and we label that desk knowledge rather than a published term. The honest comparison is this: Liberis puts its floor in writing and now says how it will collect it; YouLend does not publish one. For a seasonal business that difference is most of the decision. For a business whose takings never dip near the floor it is theoretical, and the MCA cost calculator will show you which of those two businesses you are.

Who gets approved, and what the search does to your file

Both are high-approval products because both see your data before you apply. YouLend's homepage says it approves nine out of ten applicants; the 91% and 84% figures on older pages, ours included, come from Plaid's case study of YouLend rather than from youlend.com. Liberis publishes no site-wide rate; Dojo Flex Funds quotes 90% and a Vagaro case study 95%.

Entry criteria are where the sites diverge. YouLend publishes none on its own pages, because the apply flow is script-only. What we see on the desk, and what MerchantSavvy and BusinessExpert both report, is about three months of trading and around £1,500 a month in card sales as the practical floor, with £500 a month through eBay. Liberis publishes its Opayo-channel floor: more than four months of card transactions and over £2,500 a month. Elavon phrases it as at least ten transactions totalling £2,500 a month, with 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 on Dojo's page; £60,000 a year and twelve months in the launch release), so ask Dojo which applies before you count on either.

Then the search. Dojo's page says YouLend will carry out a soft search. 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 planning a mortgage application or another business facility in the next few months, that is a real difference between two products that otherwise look alike. On guarantees, Liberis publishes that it asks for a personal guarantee from limited companies and LLPs; YouLend publishes nothing, and in the agreements we arrange the directors sign one. Our personal guarantee guide covers what that commits a director to.

How fast the money lands

YouLend: funding approved in as little as 24 hours, funds in as little as 48 hours after approval, and its partner page says 24 hours to funds. Liberis: as little as 24 hours, backed by a firmer statistic, 70% of merchants funded within one working day of approval in 2025, and a partner-page claim that one in five deals completes within four hours. Opayo's Liberis page says two working days from approval. eBay says one to two business days after approval for either lender.

Both are quick because the platform already holds the transaction data. What slows YouLend in the deals we arrange is card terminal rerouting: the settlement account is a condition of financing, which YouLend's payment account terms (updated 30 September 2025) say in plain words, and every terminal has to point at it before funds release. Liberis inside Worldpay or Elavon has no rerouting to do, because the acquirer is the platform. That is the one place the embedded model is unarguably faster.

The bit nobody mentions

A Liberis agreement signed this autumn will, by 2027, be serviced by a company that expects to be part of a Nordic Capital-owned group with a Swedish bank at its centre. Nothing in that changes a live contract. It may change the renewal offer, the product names and who answers the phone, and if you plan to renew twice you are planning to do business with a different company from the one you started with.

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, one of the lending subsidiaries. That is the group funding itself through its owner, and it is a legitimate structure; it is also why the lender named on your agreement is a YL subsidiary rather than YouLend Limited. The June 2026 breach was at YouLend US LLC, involved US customer data and US notification letters, and we have seen nothing to suggest UK merchant data was touched. We say so because the headline travels further than the detail.

Where the money moves is the last quiet point. YouLend repayments run through a settlement account it operates under its payment-institution licence. Liberis collections run through a Modulr electronic-money account. Neither is a bank account with FSCS cover; both are safeguarded e-money accounts, which is fine for a repayment account and no place to leave a float.

Worked examples

Neither lender publishes a rate card, so the 12% fee below is an assumption chosen to make the two columns comparable, not a YouLend or Liberis figure. The split and the takings are ours too. Swap in the numbers from your own offer; the shape of the comparison survives the swap.

Who fits where

Profiles from the enquiries we see, matched against the published criteria above. The right-hand column is the door that fits, which is a different thing from a recommendation.

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