Warning- it's dull, niche, and doesn't end humanity 🤷‍♂️. 

I spent last year collecting and structuring data on UK company debt. I added value by being able to search the data in novel ways. The result was intelligence on pretty much any niche debt market. 

But there was data I couldn't unlock. Data that wasn't supported by legacy API, like:
✅ Location of any property/site/security.
✅ Description of any property/site/security.

This level of data creates insight into niches within niches, for example, different property debt products.

The data is in pdf charge registration documents filed at Companies House. So, we created a process where the AI reads the pdfs to extract the location and the site/security description.

I was blown away by the first set of results. That's when I realised we're at the start of an information revolution. Now we can address the problems of asymmetry of information and the principal-agent problem. In a location-driven, opaque market, this is a superpower!

The benefit for property developers is unbiased information on who's really financing the types of deals in the areas they're interested in.


FYI- I'm not a tech expert. My partner Luke Bussey deals with that side of things.

I can't even deal with iPhone updates 🤷‍♂️.

How AI adds value for property developers


I’ve analysed 6.7 million companies incorporated between 1416 and 2020. 234 have had “Nucleus” listed as a charge holder (see appendix for a list of charge holder names).

153 (65.4%) have no history of insolvency.

8 (3.4%) had a history of insolvency prior to Nucleus being a charge holder.

73 (31.2%) first entered some form of insolvency proceedings after the registration of a charge by Nucleus.

Of the 8 with a history of insolvency prior to a charge being registered by Nucleus, 2 are currently in receivership, 2 are dissolved and 4 are active.

Analysing the level of insolvencies post charge registration is a great way to indicate how aggressive your lender is likely to be with regard to collecting defaults.

Current status for companies in the population

As you dig deeper it doesn’t appear to get much better. Particularly if you’re a borrower that’s just about to climb into bed with Nucleus.

To discount the timing mismatch of various loan origination dates, we’ll look at the time (in months) between charge registration and insolvency action starting. This will make comparisons to other lenders in future articles more enlightening.

The above graphs look at insolvency action against each charge registered, not against unique borrowers. Each legal entity can have one or more charges from multiple lenders, often registered months or years apart.

7% of the population have a history of insolvency prior to Nucleus becoming a charge holder. They are labelled “prior” and included for completion.

21% of insolvency actions start within three months of the charge being created. Either Nucleus had their credit decisioning badly wrong or their strategy could be “high volume, high interest, high defaults, great collections”

The spike at seven and fifteen months is largely driven by one group that appears to have hit the skids.

Nucleus advertises loans of up to £50,000,000 (I suspect the average ticket size is mid-six figures to low seven). I don’t know how many loans they’ve written of this size but I can make sense of an argument that insolvency is a better route for the recovery of high-value loans.

I would imagine the owners and directors of a business seeking a £50M facility from Nucleus don’t have personal assets anywhere near £50M, therefore insolvency as a primary recovery route seems to make sense.

I’ll use Iwoca for comparison because my next article is on them. 

: Iwoca has insolvency rates dramatically lower than Nucleus. Iwoca advertises loans of up to £750,000 but I suspect the average ticket is much lower. Perhaps mid-five to low six figures.

Insolvency as a primary route to recovery for smaller ticket loans doesn’t make as much sense compared to bigger ticket loans. There isn’t an economy of scale, and smaller loans can be collected out of personal assets easier, even more so if the business has no assets to liquidate!

I’m not saying using personal guarantees as a primary route of recovery is good. I’m just stating that I understand the argument that smaller ticket lenders may gain more comfort from a PG than a charge.

I suspect the difference in loan size is a factor in explaining the insolvency rate difference between Iwoca and Nucleus clients but I don’t think it explains it anywhere near its entirety.

The majority of their borrowers don’t end up in insolvency and it’s worth noting I’m only looking at loans with charges. Maybe their unsecured book is in rude health. Perhaps without the help of lenders like Nucleus insolvency rates for this pool of businesses would have been greater than one-third.

This is the first in a series of articles on what to look for in potential lenders. In future articles I will explain why the borrower insolvency rate difference between Nucleus and Iwoca borrowers is so wide by covering:

Second and third charge lending Vs first charge

Lessons from my machine learning borrower insolvency model

If you’re in the lending, insolvency, or turnaround profession I’d love to read your comments. Especially if you have any other angles you’d like me to include.

Nucleus Business Cash Advance Limited
Nucleus Cash Flow Finance Limited
Nucleus Commercial Fiance Limited (SIC)
Nucleus Commercial Finance Limited
Nucleus Commercial FINANCE1 Limited
Nucleus Commercial FINANCE1 LTD
Nucleus Commerical Finance Limited
Nucleus Commerical FINANCE1 Limited (SIC)
Nucleus Property Finance Limited
Nucleus Property FINANCE1 Limited

Why do 1 in 3 Nucleus borrowers end up in insolvency?

After choosing a suitable and available company name, we needed a website and a clear business goal. In this post, I’ll be writing about the steps we took to launch our website in a little over a month.

Ask me how long it takes to launch a website and I'll ask you how long a piece of string is. I've seen websites launched in as little as a week or taking months. With just two stakeholders, Tom and myself, I knew if we focused on the essentials we could relatively quickly get a site up and begin our initial sales and marketing campaigns.

Before designing and building the website I needed copy.

Copywriting is the focus of ads, sales letters, sales emails, PPC landing pages, and more.

Because we were working from assumptions about the business that we would validate over time, nothing we did would be set in stone. Knowing that we would continually improve and iterate on the website, meant that we could launch with something good enough.

But before writing a line of copy, we needed to figure out a few things first that would be essential with each one informing the next.

In part two of this post, I'll be diving deeper into each of these topics and how they are the necessary precursors to launching our website.

How we launched BorrowingWell in a little over a month (Part 1 of 2)

When Tom approached me in late December with the idea of creating a commercial credit brokerage I was immediately interested.

I knew that with my experience working at several of B2B SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) startups in the United States and with Tom’s experience on the credit committee of a non-bank business lender and being a Fellow Member of Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (

), we could radically change the industry by relentlessly focusing on the customer and providing an exceptional end-to-end experience.

Starting a company has never been easier, cheaper, or quicker, and gone are the days of writing a lengthy business plan as 

no business plan survives first contact with a customer

. It’s often quoted that 9 out of 10 businesses fail, but according to data from the Office of National Statistics, the actual number is 10% in the first year, rising to 42% in year five. The solution is to fail fast and to validate your business idea with real customers in as short a time frame as possible.

“an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model” — Steve Blank

We needed a name, a website, and we set a goal of booking a meeting with one prospective borrower after launching the site.

After a few days of brainstorming and checking available domain names, we had come up with the name BorrowingWell. We think the play on words with Well lends itself quite well (redundancy intended). Well — meaning wellness, and a Well, giving access to water which is essential for life. Representing financial health and access to capital.

Be sure to check back as in my next post, I'll be talking about the steps we took to rapidly develop the website, which included our mission, values, branding, positioning and most importantly, our go-to-market and distribution strategies.

How we are building BorrowingWell

A month ago all we had was an idea, and now it’s here! But this isn’t a case of believing something into reality.

It’s taken the Founders of BorrowingWell their entire careers to get to where they are now, and that place is being the best option for businesses looking to raise debt finance.

We believe that BorrowingWell will serve the market better than any other service provider by being sector leader on the following three factors:

We're critical of the status-quo of listing 

, so we only offer one business lending service. Don’t worry though, this service covers every hire purchase, leasing and debt facility you will ever need. It’s just a simpler way of borrowing.

We're completely transparent about how we see the market and why we chose to market our service the way we do. Our short guides go over 

 considering raising debt finance. Reading them won’t take long and it will help make your decision to raise debt finance an informed one.

Accounting and business lending decisioning are two core areas that we believe Brokers need to provide the best service.

Tom, one of our Founders, is an ACCA fellow, and last year he was on the credit committee of a non-bank business lender. It was Tom who was deciding which business would get funding opportunities and which would not.

BorrowingWell is now live. We’d love to speak to any business leaders who are interested in raising debt finance.

You can select an appointment for yourself using our ‘book consultation’ button on the home page. Our appointments are free of charge with no obligation on your part whatsoever.

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Inside BorrowingWell

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