Just over two years after launching, ABF has now surpassed £100m in finance origination. It’s a significant milestone for a young business, and one we’re genuinely proud of, but for us, the number itself only tells part of the story.
When we launched Allied Business Finance in May 2024, we knew we had the experience, the industry relationships and the ambition to build something different. What we couldn’t have known was quite how quickly the business would develop.
Now, just over two years later, ABF has surpassed £100 million in finance origination.
For a business that’s still relatively young, that’s a figure we’re extremely proud of. It isn’t simply a number on a spreadsheet, though; it represents the businesses we’ve worked with, the relationships we’ve built, and the confidence that customers, introducers and funding partners have placed in ABF along the way.
From a new brokerage to a £100m business
ABF was established by six experienced finance professionals who’d each spent years working in the industry before we came together. Between us, we’d built up a broad range of experience and knowledge, along with relationships across the business finance sector that had taken most of a career to develop.
We didn’t set out to create another finance brokerage for the sake of it. What we wanted was a business where that combined experience could give customers a more personal service, one where we’d take the time to understand what they were actually trying to achieve, and work with our funding partners to find finance options that genuinely suited their circumstances rather than whatever happened to be easiest to arrange.
That approach has stayed central to everything we’ve done since launch, and it’s shaped almost every decision we’ve made along the way, from which funding partners we chose to work with, to how we structured the team, to the way we handle a first conversation with a new customer.
Surpassing £100m in finance origination gives us a useful measure of the progress we’ve made against that ambition. It shows that businesses have been prepared to put their trust in a relatively young brokerage, and that we’ve been able to build the kind of relationships needed to turn that trust into a sustainable business rather than a short run of good luck.
It also says something about the strength of the team behind it. We’re still a small business, six directors bringing different backgrounds and areas of experience together under one roof. It’s something we talked about a lot in the early days, how much stronger that combined experience would make us if we could get the structure right, and two years on, the £100m milestone feels like as much a reflection of that team as it is of the number itself.
What £100m means to our customers
Ultimately, finance origination figures only mean anything because there are real businesses standing behind them. Every facility we arrange represents a business trying to solve a particular problem or take advantage of a specific opportunity, whether that’s acquiring equipment, investing in a vehicle, supporting expansion, or managing working capital through a period of change.
That’s why the relationships we build with customers matter as much as they do, arguably more than the total figure itself. A number on its own doesn’t tell you whether the people behind it had a good experience, felt properly listened to, or would come back to us the next time they needed funding. For that, we’d rather let a customer speak for themselves.
One ABF customer recently described the experience this way:
“ABF has access to several funding partners, so they can offer various options. The process was seamless as usual, and everything was handled very professionally. ABF listened to the challenges we faced as a business and offered solutions. The fact that we could speak to the team face to face made a big difference. If I were advising another business exploring funding options, I’d simply say: speak to ABF.”
That’s the part of the £100m in finance origination that we’re particularly proud of, the part that never shows up on a spreadsheet but is the reason the number exists in the first place.
A milestone, not a destination
We were delighted earlier this year to be recognised in the Asset Finance Broker 40 Report 2026, just two years after launching. At the time, we said that rankings are useful because they put a number on something that’s usually difficult to see from the outside: how much ground a young broker has actually covered in a relatively short space of time. The same is true of the £100m milestone, in a way. It gives us a tangible way to measure how far ABF has come since May 2024, when it was six people and an idea rather than a business with a track record.
But we’re not particularly interested in standing still, and we never set out to be.
We’re still a young business, and we believe there’s a significant amount of opportunity still ahead of us. The freedom to grow, adapt and shape the business on our own terms was one of the things that excited us most when we started ABF, and two years in, that hasn’t changed. If anything, having £100m of finance origination behind us gives us more confidence to keep building it that way rather than settling into a fixed model just because it’s worked so far.
Our ambition from here is straightforward enough to state, even if the work behind it isn’t: keep developing our customer and funding-partner relationships, keep looking for opportunities to do things a bit better, and help more businesses access the finance they actually need rather than whatever’s quickest to arrange.
That might mean widening the range of funding partners we work with, so we can say yes to a broader range of sectors and asset types. It might mean investing more in the team, so the personal service that got us here doesn’t get diluted as the business grows. Growth for its own sake was never really the point; it’s what that growth allows us to keep doing for the businesses we work with that matters.
Surpassing £100m in finance origination is a significant achievement for a business that’s only just over two years old, and we don’t take that lightly. We’re already thinking about what comes next, though, because £100m was never meant to be the destination, just a useful marker of how far we’d come by the time we reached it.
We’re planning to keep covering more ground.
Talk to ABF about your business finance requirements →
Important information: Finance is subject to status, terms and conditions, and approval isn’t guaranteed. Spreading the cost of an asset or accessing working capital through finance typically means paying interest, so the total amount payable is usually higher than paying in full upfront. Agreements are generally fixed-term commitments and, depending on the size and structure of the finance, you may be asked to provide a personal guarantee, which means you could be personally liable if the business cannot meet its obligations.
The £100m origination figure and customer experience referenced in this article relate to ABF’s performance to date and don’t guarantee similar outcomes, terms or experiences for any other business. Allied Business Finance is a credit broker, not a lender, and can introduce you to a range of finance providers.
