Certain Bridge Limited

Gary Hall is a bit of a live wire. As a boy, he was a maths whizz - a working class lad whose parents invested in getting him the best education they could. Grown up and already with an impressive CV in property finance, he took the growth of alternative lending as a clarion call to join up with his co-founder and start Certain Bridge and offer their clients something the big banks can't - fast finance. Gary Hall kicked off in commercial real estate finance and was headhunted into high volume retail finance - where he noted that if you could finance things more quickly than another firm, speed was a major competitive advantage. That's something he's made a founding principle of Certain Bridge , the alternative lender he set up with his codirector in early 2018. Certain Bridge provide bridging finance - short term mortgage loans intended to help property developers, property investors and Business entrepreneurs, snap up deals quickly, or navigate a tricky period wi

Why the Big Banks are losing their share of the lending market The global credit crisis in 2007-8 caused problems for everyone. But lending to smaller and mid-size companies was particularly badly affected. Many banks practically shut up shop completely. And while major economies eventually shrugged off the legacy of the crisis - even Greece, then in terrible straits, has recently issued a government bond with a negative interest rate! - SME lending never really came back from the dead. The Big Banks perceived the risk of lending to SMEs as being relatively high, and the rewards, in a low interest rate environment, were not. That left SMEs starved of funds for growth. It's easy to blame SME funding problems simply on the credit crunch and a decade of close to zero interest rates. But in fact, something else is happening, too; the big banks are losing their share of the SME lending market to upstarts such as challenger bank Shawbrook or peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle.