Applying

Many of our customers are owner-managed companies, but some have more than one director. Both directors can be involved in the application.

How it works

The applying director starts the application, then invites the co-director to join via the portal. The co-director receives an email with a secure link, completes their own identity check, and confirms the application on behalf of the company. We then have signed acknowledgement from both directors that the loan is for a business purpose and that they accept the terms.

What does not change

• The loan is still to the company, not to either director personally.
• No personal guarantee is taken from any director.
• The lending decision is on the company's affordability and the company's history. We look at both directors for identity and AML purposes only.

Where the directors disagree

If one director wants the loan and another does not, we will not proceed until that is resolved internally. Borrowing is a company decision and needs the agreement of those authorised to bind the company. Use the in-application chat if you need to pause the application while that conversation happens.

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Yes. Rather than a single take-it-or-leave-it offer, we typically present a small set of choices — different amounts and different terms — when the file supports more than one option. You can compare them in the portal side by side, pick the one that works for your business and sign that one.

What you will see

Each offer shows the amount, the term in days, the repayment schedule, the total cost of the credit, and the key figures you need to decide. They are real, signable offers; they are not estimates.

Choosing

Pick the one that fits your cash flow. A shorter term costs less in total but each payment is larger; a longer term spreads it out but costs more overall. There is no penalty for picking the cheaper one and there is no bonus for picking the longer one — it is the choice that genuinely suits you.

If none of them work

You are not obliged to accept any of them. If the offers do not fit, tell us through the in-application chat or by email and we will discuss whether something else is possible.

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Many of our customers come to us through a recommendation from another business owner, and we are grateful when that happens. We do operate a referral programme and the current terms — what the referrer receives, what the new applicant receives, how a referral is recorded — are published in the customer portal under Refer a friend.

How to refer someone

1. Sign in to your portal account.
2. Open the Refer a friend page.
3. Send the unique referral link to whoever you have in mind.
4. When they apply through that link, the referral is automatically credited to your account.

What we do not do

We do not pressure customers into referring. We do not offer rewards that depend on a particular outcome (we offer them on a successful loan being drawn down, which is a normal arrangement, but we do not offer rewards for getting someone to apply when the loan is not right for them).

If you have any question about a referral that does not seem to have been recorded, the in-portal chat is the quickest way to ask.

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When you apply, we need to see how the company's main bank account behaves over roughly the last six months. There are two ways to share that, and people often ask which to pick. The honest answer is that both lead to the same decision — the difference is mostly speed and preference. Here is how to choose.

The two routes, side by side

• Open Banking (read-only). Where it is offered, you authorise a regulated provider on your own bank's login screen, and the statements come straight to us. It is the quickest route and there is nothing to upload or mistype. It is read-only — it cannot move money — and you can switch it off at any time.
• Upload statements yourself. You download PDF or CSV statements from your bank and add them to the application. This is fully supported and, for many applicants, the default. It works even if your bank does not support Open Banking, or you simply prefer not to connect.

Which should you choose?

Choose Open Banking if you want the fastest path and you are happy to authenticate with your bank — it keeps the same-day-decision window as wide as possible. Choose uploading if your bank does not offer Open Banking, the connection will not complete, you do not have online banking, or you would simply rather share the files yourself. Neither choice counts for or against you; we read the same six months either way, and we never move money from the account.

If you upload, what we need

• The last six months of statements on the business account the loan would be paid to.
• Complete months, downloaded directly from your bank as PDFs or CSVs — not screenshots or photographs.
• Uploaded into the application at the step provided.

Uploaded statements take a little longer to process than a live connection, which is the only practical trade-off. If your bank only lets you download a few months at a time, upload what you have and tell us — we will follow up rather than block the application. See what happens if you cannot connect your bank.

Is Open Banking safe, and can I revoke it?

Yes on both. We never see your banking password, the access is read-only, and every provider is FCA-regulated. A connection lasts up to 90 days before it must be renewed, and you can revoke it instantly from your portal or your bank's app, with no effect on a loan you have already signed. See what Open Banking is and is it safe and how consent and revocation work.

What we do with what we see

However you share them, the statements are read and categorised to assess the company's affordability — see what information goes into a lending decision and how we verify bank statements. We are reading the account, never moving money from it.

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Under the UK GDPR you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us about how we use it. The formal name for this is a Subject Access Request (SAR).

How to ask

Three equally good routes:

• Inside the customer portal, on the Support tab, choose "Get a copy of my data".
• Use the General Support Enquiry form on our Forms & Requests page and write that you want a SAR.
• Email our privacy team directly using the address on our Contact Us page.

What you receive

A copy of the personal information we hold about you, the categories of recipients we have shared it with, the retention periods that apply, and a clear pointer to your other data rights (correction, deletion, restriction and objection). The information is sent securely.

Timeframe and cost

We will respond within one month. Where a request is complex we may extend this by up to two further months, telling you why. There is no charge for a reasonable request.

Identity check

For your protection we confirm your identity before releasing personal information. If we already have a verified record of you (you have applied for or held a loan with us), this is usually quick. For requests that come in cold we may need an additional document — we will tell you exactly what.

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Decision speed depends on which route the application takes and how clean the inputs are.

The fastest case

An applicant who is a UK limited company, connects via Open Banking, has clear ID and a clean credit profile, and whose bank statements pass our affordability rules cleanly, can expect a decision within minutes. That is the design target of the application flow and it is achievable for most customers.

PDF upload

Where statements are uploaded as PDFs instead, the processing adds time. Allow a few hours within working hours.

Human review

Where the file is referred to a credit officer — because the score is borderline, because there are vulnerability signals, because the situation is unusual, or because we need to ask a question — allow up to one working day. We will keep you updated in the portal at every step.

Out-of-hours

Applications submitted out of hours are queued. The automated steps still run, so the application can be ready for the credit officer to act on first thing the next working morning.

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If you have applied with us before — and the previous loan was managed in good standing — we treat that as the starting point for a fresh application, not as a blank page. The full new-customer flow is not needed.

What is re-used

• Your identity and director details, with a quick confirmation that nothing has changed.
• The company details, with a quick check against Companies House to refresh anything that has.
• Your contact information, where you have asked us to keep it.

What we still need

• Fresh bank statements (or a fresh Open Banking connection) covering the most recent six months — affordability is always assessed on current data.
• Confirmation of the new loan purpose and the amount you want to borrow.
• A new Key Information Sheet (KIS) and a new Business Loan Agreement to sign — every loan is its own agreement, even if the company is the same.

The whole returning-customer flow typically takes a few minutes inside the portal, and the decision tends to be quicker because the picture is already familiar to our credit team.

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Lending is built around the idea that you will repay. Sometimes circumstances change and that becomes harder — a lost contract, a late-paying customer, a sudden cost. When that happens, the most important thing you can do is tell us early.

What we can do

• A payment freeze for a short, agreed period while you sort things out.
• A payment arrangement that spreads the missed amount across the rest of the loan, or extends the term.
• A hardship variation for longer-term changes — see our hardship article.
• Refinancing the existing loan into new terms that better fit your current cash flow.

What you can expect

We do not apply charges that are not in your agreement. We do not chase aggressively. We do not pass the loan to a third party for collection without first trying to agree something with you. If vulnerability is in the picture, the file is routed to our customer-care team and treated according to our vulnerability policy.

Free help

Independent advice for businesses is available from Business Debtline (businessdebtline.org, 0800 197 6026). You do not need our permission to speak to them.

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The Key Information Sheet (KIS) is a short summary of your loan that we give you before anything is signed. This is business lending to a limited company, so it is not a regulated consumer document — but we use a clear, one-page summary anyway, because you should be able to see the whole deal at a glance.

What it covers

• Who the lender is and how to reach us.
• The amount the company would borrow and the term.
• The total amount payable and the total cost of the credit.
• The fees that apply and when.
• The repayment schedule.
• The 14-day withdrawal period we offer as a matter of policy, beginning the day after the agreement is signed.
• The right to settle early.
• What happens if a payment is missed.
• How to complain and where to find free, independent business debt advice.

What it does not replace

The KIS is a summary. The full terms are in the Business Loan Agreement itself, which you also see before signing. The two documents say the same things; the KIS sets them out in plain English on one page, the agreement sets them out in full.

You can download the KIS as a PDF and keep it. If you would like to talk it through before signing, please contact us — we are happy to do that on the phone or by email.

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Where Open Banking is offered it can be the quickest route, but it is optional and never the only route. Uploading your statements yourself is fully supported — for many applicants it is the default. If you are not using Open Banking — your bank does not support it, the connection failed, you would rather not, or you do not have online banking — you can upload PDF or CSV statements straight into the application.

What we need

We need the last six months of statements on the business bank account that the loan would be paid to. They should be:

• downloaded directly from your bank as PDFs (not screenshots and not photographs);
• complete months, not partial windows;
• uploaded into the application — there is a step for this.

What happens next

Once uploaded, the statements are read and categorised by our system in the same way as Open Banking data, and the decision continues from there. The only practical difference is timing: PDF processing takes a little longer than a live connection, so the same-day-decision window is narrower.

If you have a partial set of statements (for example because the bank only lets you download three months in one go), upload what you have and use the in-application chat to tell us. We will follow up rather than block the application.

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Open Banking is a UK-regulated framework that lets you give a regulated firm permission to do one of two things with your bank account: read your statements (an AISP service) or initiate a payment on your behalf (a PISP service). It was introduced by UK competition rules and is supervised by the Financial Conduct Authority.

How we use it

Where it is offered, you can choose to connect your account through Open Banking read-only, via a regulated AISP, so we can look at your business bank statements. It sits alongside — it does not replace — uploading your statements yourself, which is a fully supported route and the default way to share them. If you connect, the information we see is the same as an upload — six months of transactions on the business account — but it comes straight from your bank, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to mistype.

Is it safe?

• You authorise the connection through your own bank's login screen. We never see your banking password.
• The connection is read-only. An AISP cannot move money out of your account, even if it wanted to.
• You can revoke the connection at any time, either inside our portal or directly in your bank's app.
• Every regulated AISP is on the FCA register and has to meet strict security and conduct rules.

You can always upload instead

Open Banking is optional, and it is only available on some applications. Uploading your statements yourself is a fully supported route — for many applicants it is the default — so you can simply upload PDF or CSV bank statements straight into the application. The decision uses the same information; it just takes a little longer because the files need to be processed. Our Our Technology and How We Lend pages explain the full picture.

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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is the UK regulator for most consumer-facing financial firms. It maintains a free, public register at register.fca.org.uk where you can look up any regulated firm by name or by its Firm Reference Number (FRN).

Why it matters to you

The register tells you:

• whether a firm is currently authorised;
• what permissions the firm holds (what it is allowed to do);
• the firm's address and contact details;
• any disciplinary history.

If you ever want to verify that you are dealing with the genuine Credicorp Limited, the first stop is Companies House (company number 16093826); the FCA register lists firms authorised for consumer-facing activities. The FCA's ScamSmart warnings list also flags clone firms — people imitating real lenders. If anything you receive does not match what is on the register, please contact us using the details on this site before acting on it.

Our framing

Credicorp Limited provides commercial lending to UK incorporated bodies corporate, which is outside FCA consumer-credit regulation because a company is not an individual or a relevant recipient of credit under Articles 60B and 60L of the FSMA Regulated Activities Order 2001; Credicorp is not authorised or regulated by the FCA for consumer-credit lending and this product is not covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service or the FSCS. The firm's regulated status and FRN — where applicable — are stated on the relevant regulatory page on this site. If a particular product is offered under a different permission, that is stated in the product's own pre-contract information.

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Our mobile experience is a progressive web app — a website that looks and feels like a native app once you add it to your phone's home screen. Open credicorp.co.uk/app on your phone to use it.

Adding it to your phone

On iPhone, open Safari, go to credicorp.co.uk/app, tap the Share icon, and choose Add to Home Screen. On Android, open Chrome, go to the same address, open the menu and choose Add to Home screen. After that, it behaves like any other app on your phone — its own icon, full-screen mode, and push notifications if you opt in.

What you can do in it

• Track your application and read messages from us.
• Sign documents, including the Key Information Sheet (KIS) and the Business Loan Agreement.
• Make a payment.
• See your statements and download them as PDFs.
• Reach our support team through the in-app chat.

The full portal

If you would rather use a desktop browser, the same portal is at credicorp.co.uk/portal. Everything in the mobile app is in the desktop portal too — they share the same account and the same data. Use whichever suits you.

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