Dan Gateshill on financial enablement

How do you operate as a franchise of ASC and what are your services and specialisms?

It's my own business, but I'm operating under the branding of ASC Finance for Business. We have 21 offices around the country in different geographical patches – there's a lot of expertise in the network.

We cover all aspects of commercial finance: anything from start-up finance to funding for large ground-up developments and everything in between including working capital, recovery loans scheme, invoice finance, asset finance, commercial mortgages, limited company, buy to lets – you name it; we can help.

We help a whole range of businesses of different sizes. As a broker, we approach lenders on behalf of our clients, then go back to the clients with a range of options so they can choose what works best for them.

We're independent of all lenders; we work for our clients, not for the banks. It's very much the client's decision as to which lender they wish to proceed with.

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

As brokers, what we do is inherently transactional: we find the right finance for our clients. But ASC has been around for more than 50 years and the reason for that is because we're a relationship business: we have great relationships with our clients and with our professional introducers. I get a lot of enjoyment out of building and nurturing those relationships.

We arrange finance for our clients to help them to achieve their goals and dreams. To see what the clients have done with the money and how it has manifested is always absolutely brilliant.

What does the lending landscape look like in the current economic climate?

It's undoubtedly tougher. Interest rates were increasing anyway because of the macroeconomic backdrop, inflation being very high, and geopolitical issues around the war in Ukraine. Then we had the short-term administration of Liz Truss’ Government which caused a lot of alarm in the markets and saw a further increase in interest rates.  

The effect of interest rates increasing has been that lenders are being a little stricter with their affordability calculations. The impact that has on us as brokers is that it's more difficult to get a deal over the line. 

If a client or an introducer is putting their trust in us to get it done, we need to find a way of doing it and that's where our contacts and our expertise in knowing which lenders will lend for which scenario really comes into play.