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British Business Bank agrees £100m ENABLE Guarantee with specialist business lender Cambridge & Counties Bank

Press release 21 May 2018

Cambridge & Counties Bank, which specialises in lending to small businesses mostly in property related sectors, has secured an ENABLE Guarantee via the British Business Bank.

The Guarantee will allow the Leicester-based Bank, which is jointly owned by Trinity Hall, a college of the University of Cambridge, and the Cambridgeshire Local Government Pension Fund, to offer significantly more funding to smaller businesses. The ENABLE Guarantee programme is a UK government-backed portfolio guarantee which is designed to encourage additional lending to smaller businesses. The programme is open to all UK banks and UK branches of foreign banks which lend, or intend to lend, to viable small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the UK.

Cambridge & Counties Bank focuses on lending to small firms in the North, Scotland, the Midlands, East Anglia, the South West and Wales. Small businesses that have benefited from funding from Cambridge & Counties Bank include Kemble Business Parks LLP, who utilised funding to assist in its purchase of Loch Lomond Shores shopping and leisure development, and also entrepreneurs Keith and Denice Punler who secured funding for the development of grade-B listed Castle Toward.

Two of the British Business Bank’s objectives are to increase the diversity of funding suppliers for smaller businesses, and to reduce regional imbalances in access to finance across the UK. We therefore welcome this new ENABLE Guarantee facility with Cambridge & Counties Bank – a relatively new entrant to the market with a regional focus – which will help more UK smaller businesses get the funding they need to grow and succeed. - Reinald de Monchy MD for Guarantee & Wholesale Solutions at British Business Bank
We are delighted to be working with the British Business Bank, which shares our objective of boosting the UK economy by helping to finance smaller businesses. This transaction is yet another significant milestone in our history as we move towards our sixth birthday. The ENABLE guarantee allows us to extend our customer centric approach, focussing on the professional and corporate property sectors. - Will German Chief Risk Officer of Cambridge & Counties Bank

Further Information

Notes to editors

About Cambridge & Counties Bank

Cambridge & Counties Bank has a unique structure being jointly owned by Trinity Hall, a College of the University of Cambridge, and Cambridgeshire Local Government Pension Fund. They each own 50 per cent of the bank, whose management team is led by chief executive Mike Kirsopp who has previously held a number of senior roles in the banking and building society sectors.

For further information on Cambridge & Counties Bank, visit ccbank.co.uk or call 0344 225 3939.

About the British Business Bank

The British Business Bank is the UK’s national economic development bank. Established in November 2014, its mission is to make finance markets for smaller businesses work more effectively, enabling those businesses to prosper, grow and build UK economic activity. Our remit is to design, deliver and efficiently manage UK-wide smaller business access to finance programmes for the UK government.

The British Business Bank is currently supporting over£4bn of finance to more than 65,000 smaller businesses and participating in a further £6.6bn of finance to mid-cap businesses (as at September 2017).

As well as increasing both supply and diversity of finance for UK smaller businesses through its programmes, the Bank works to raise awareness of the finance options available to smaller businesses. 

More information, including a legal structure chart for British Business Bank plc and its subsidiaries, can be found on the British Business Bank website.

As the holding company of the group operating under the trading name of British Business Bank, it is a development bank wholly owned by HM Government which is not authorised or regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) or the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The British Business Bank operates under its own brand name through a number of subsidiaries, one of which is authorised and regulated by the FCA.

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