The combination of continually depressed interest rates combined with lockdowns leading to consumers having higher than expected savings for this stage of the economic cycle has created a unique environment where lenders are flush with liquidity in a low-yield environment.

The economy is like a coiled spring as lenders prepare for the potential of negative interest rates and look  to deploy capital to support resilient business sectors. In the meantime many businesses are still relying on government backed schemes such as furlough, BBLS and CBILS for survival.

 While, these have played instrumental roles in keeping many resilient SMEs alive and acted as important triage systems to identify and support viable businesses that needed credit, we must now accept that we have passed this triage phase and instead it is imperative that we identify, prioritise and protect our most resilient individual business sectors and segments.

At Conister we have delivered upon all of our initial objectives. We had an allocation limit of £20 million for the CBILS and BBLS schemes and so far we have lent £19.7million, and I expect we will fulfil our allocation this month. Without doubt, the scale of applications was enormous and so we applied for and received an additional allocation of £5 million for the CBILS scheme and we will focus lending this to robust business sectors that we believe will thrive in the future. Conister will continue to do all it can, working alongside Government and traditional lenders, to support British businesses.