YouLend vs Wayflyer: what each one actually publishes

What Wayflyer’s YouLend page gets wrong

Start here, because it is probably how you arrived. The current version of wayflyer.com/gb/compare-youlend went live between April and September 2026. Its comparison table lists a maximum funding amount of 20m for Wayflyer against 10m for YouLend. Its own FAQ, further down the same page, says YouLend advances “typically range from around £1,000 to £1 million”. Both cannot be right, and neither matches what YouLend publishes, which is funding “up to £2,000,000” on the merchants page and the same figure in its FAQ, with Dojo and eBay capping their own routes at £1,000,000.

The pricing claim is looser still. Wayflyer writes that YouLend advances are “typically priced on a factor rate” with third-party reviews cited for roughly 1.10 to 1.35 times, and that personal guarantees are “commonly requested” according to several independent 2026 reviews. Every one of those numbers is attributed to reviews Wayflyer does not name. We checked youlend.com: there is no factor rate, no fee range and no statement on guarantees anywhere on the site. Saying YouLend publishes nothing is a fair criticism of YouLend. Filling the gap with unnamed reviews and putting it in a comparison table is a different thing.

Two claims on that page do hold up against primary sources, and we will say so. YouLend is an embedded lender that powers advances inside Amazon, eBay, Dojo and Worldline, which matches YouLend's own partner pages, although Wayflyer names Shopify too and that one appears only on YouLend's Trustpilot profile rather than its UK site. And YouLend can require a settlement account that receives your processor payouts as a condition of financing, which is exactly what YouLend's payment-account terms say. Wayflyer sends funds to your own bank account and never touches your card settlement.

Who YouLend actually is

YouLend Limited is the funding engine inside other people's software. Dojo's core business funding is YouLend, and so are Amazon's UK cash advance and Flexible Financing Line, the YouLend half of eBay Seller Capital, Just Eat's partner funding, and the cash advances launched at Teya and Worldline in January 2026. The homepage counts more than 300 partners, 370,000 businesses funded and ten or more countries, and claims approval for nine applicants in ten. Group accounts to 31 March 2025 show revenue of £171.5m and a profit of £8.8m, with EQT the ultimate controlling party through a Singapore holding company.

The mechanics are simple and the disclosure is thin. Approval in as little as 24 hours, funds in as little as 48 hours after that, a single fixed fee that is never published, and repayment as a percentage of each day's takings, collected inside a settlement account YouLend runs under FCA payment institution permissions, FRN 947287. That licence covers the account rather than the advance, and YouLend's regulatory page states that its UK financing agreements are not FCA-regulated. Our YouLend review covers each partner route and what it changes about the offer.

Who Wayflyer actually is

Wayflyer was founded in Dublin in 2019 by Aidan Corbett and Jack Pierse and started lending in 2020. It reached a $1.6bn valuation in February 2022, cut staff during the rate shock, and says it has now deployed more than $6 billion to over 7,000 businesses. The current products in the UK are a Cash Advance repaid as a share of revenue, a Term Loan repaid in fixed amounts, Rolling Financing that gives a pre-approved limit over a twelve-month contract, and a separate small-business loan of up to £1m for firms outside ecommerce.

The contracting party matters here. Wayflyer's platform terms define Wayflyer as Wayflyer Limited, an Irish company registered under number 602786 at One Spencer Dock in Dublin. The surviving UK company, Wayflyer UK Limited, is filed at Companies House under an information-technology consultancy code, and the UK entity that carried the credit-granting code, Wayflyer Financial UK Ltd, was dissolved on 2 July 2024. Nothing on the GB site mentions the FCA, the Central Bank of Ireland or any regulator; we searched the homepage, the products page and the platform terms and found no such wording. Lending to a UK limited company is outside the consumer-credit regime, so that is not in itself a problem, but a UK borrower should know that the agreement is with an Irish company and that the Financial Ombudsman is not part of the picture. Our Wayflyer review sets out the entity structure in full.

On funding lines Wayflyer has been busy. A $250 million two-year credit facility with ATLAS SP Partners was announced on 18 February 2026, and on 30 July 2026 Fortress agreed to purchase up to $1.5 billion of assets originated through the platform over three years. The last Irish accounts we could read cover 2023: turnover €62.5m against an operating loss of €40.9m, an improvement on the €76.9m loss the year before. Read the losses as the cost of building a book rather than as a warning; read the facilities as appetite, which is what actually decides whether your application gets funded this month.

What you actually pay

Wayflyer's help centre gives the number that most lenders in this market will not: the fee is “typically between 5% and 10% of the total advance amount”, charged once, with an example of a $100,000 advance at 6% repaying $106,000. Its blog uses around 7% on $100,000. There are no origination, prepayment or late fees, and two levers are published: a shorter payback earns a lower fee, and a larger amount often earns a smaller percentage. Once you accept an offer the fee cannot be renegotiated downwards. Repaying early is allowed and the total owed does not change, so there is no discount for speed, only an earlier finish.

YouLend charges “a single fixed fee” and never says what it is. There is no rate card, no fee range, no repayment-percentage range and no early-settlement statement on any public page. Its FAQ does confirm that where a third party introduced you, YouLend may pay that party a commission that is typically a percentage of your fixed fee. The practical consequence is that you cannot compare YouLend with anything until you are holding an offer, and once you are holding one the useful step is to convert the fee into a monthly cost using the expected payback. Our MCA cost guide walks through that conversion, and our factor rate versus APR page explains why a 7% fee and a 7% interest rate are nothing like the same thing.

A 5% to 10% band sounds cheap against a market where 12% to 20% is common, and on a like-for-like basis it usually is. The catch is the term. Wayflyer's horizon is three to nine months, and its help centre puts the typical estimate at twelve to twenty-four weeks. A 7% fee cleared in six months costs about 1.17% a month; the same 7% over twenty-four months would cost about 0.29%. Short money at a small fee is still expensive money per month, and it takes a great deal of cash out of the business while it runs.

Who gets approved, and who is turned away

Wayflyer publishes its criteria and they are specific. At least £10,000 in average monthly sales, met for the preceding six months at a minimum. At least six months of trading for ecommerce and software, rising to two years for retail and service businesses. Incorporation in a supported country, with the United Kingdom on the list. A soft credit check, so applying does not mark your file. The exclusions are just as clear: no start-ups, and no dropshippers, because Wayflyer funds only ecommerce companies that hold their own stock. The wholesale product adds its own bar of £250,000 in annual sales and distribution through at least one bricks-and-mortar retailer.

YouLend publishes none of this. No minimum turnover, no minimum trading period, no sector list and no business-structure rule appears on youlend.com, which is one reason the third-party pages quoting a £3,000 floor and three months of trading have such a long life. What we can describe is how the decision is made: a soft search, sales data read from the platform or through open banking, and an advance sized against monthly card or platform turnover, which Dojo's page puts at 0.8 to 1 times. The platform you apply through often sets its own rules on top.

On guarantees the two are opposites in disclosure rather than in substance. Wayflyer states that it does not ask for personal guarantees or take equity, while noting that its Term Loan carries optional security that can lower the cost of capital, which is a different thing from a guarantee and worth reading carefully. YouLend says nothing. A director for whom this is the deciding point should get the answer in writing from YouLend before the sales data goes in, and should read what our personal guarantee guide says about what is actually being signed.

How fast the money lands

Wayflyer's homepage promises “Apply in minutes. Access capital in hours”, with a ten-minute application, a decision in as little as 24 hours and most businesses funded within hours of accepting. Its help centre is more measured, giving a standard timeline of one to three business days, and its about page records a fastest application-to-offer time of 94 minutes. YouLend says approval in as little as 24 hours and funds in as little as 48 hours after approval. Neither is slow. The difference is what happens after the decision: Wayflyer pays your bank account, while a YouLend advance needs the settlement account plumbed into your card processing before anything moves.

Both are pushing towards funding that does not need a fresh application each time. Wayflyer's Rolling Financing gives a pre-approved limit over a twelve-month contract with payment only on what you draw, and its always-on funding, rolled out to ecommerce customers in the UK during 2026, sets a Flex Limit that the help centre says is reassessed every 30 to 40 days. Amazon's Flexible Financing Line, which YouLend built, works on a similar idea: a pre-approved amount you draw in pieces with a fee charged per withdrawal. In both cases the limit is a moving number tied to your trading, so treat a headline limit as an indication rather than a facility you can count on next quarter.

What the review scores are worth

YouLend's Trustpilot profile stood at 4.8 from 12,426 reviews when we checked it on 7 September 2026, with 94% at five stars and 4% at one. Its own company-overview page claims better than 4.9, which is the sort of small overstatement worth noticing on a site that publishes so little else. Wayflyer quotes 4.6 from more than 500 reviews on its GB pages; an April 2026 capture of the same page said 4.7, and Trustpilot's own listing blocks automated reads, so the last figure we could verify from Trustpilot itself was 4.8 from 394 reviews in June 2025. We would rather say that than print a number we could not open.

The gap in volume is a distribution story rather than a quality one. YouLend collects reviews from hundreds of thousands of merchants who met it inside Dojo, Amazon or eBay, while Wayflyer sells direct to a smaller number of larger brands. What neither score tells you is what the money cost. Review pages measure how the application felt, and a business that was funded in a day tends to write a five-star review before the first repayment has left the account.

The bit nobody mentions

Stacking. Wayflyer's help centre states that each advance carries its own repayment rate, so a second advance is added on top of the first: 10% of daily sales plus 15% of daily sales means 25% of daily sales going out. It then adds a line worth reading twice. Fixed-repayment advances will always be stacked if you take more funding. A brand that tops up twice in a good year can find a quarter or more of its revenue committed before it pays a supplier, and the first advance does not shrink to make room.

The second is the remittance cap. If your sales spike, a percentage-of-revenue advance takes more money, faster. Wayflyer says some offers may include a cap on the remittance, but that these are offered only in specific circumstances, and that caps are cumulative and carry over. So the protection exists and it is not standard. Ask whether your offer has one. On YouLend's side the equivalent is the settlement account: using it is a condition of the financing, and closing it before the advance is repaid may trigger an event of default, which is a sentence worth knowing before you switch card providers.

Worked examples

Wayflyer publishes a fee band, so the first example uses a figure from inside it. YouLend publishes nothing, so the second uses an assumed fee and an assumed sweep, both labelled. The point of the pair is not which is cheaper on paper, it is how differently the same £100,000 leaves your bank account.

Who fits where

Profiles we meet, set against the published criteria. Wayflyer is not on our panel, so where it is the better fit we say so plainly rather than steering you elsewhere.

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