Funding Options Review (2026)

Funding Options, which now trades as Funding Options by Tide, does not lend money to anybody. It is a credit broker: you describe what your business needs, it puts your details in front of lenders on its panel, and it is paid a commission by whichever lender you eventually borrow from. That model is legitimate and it is common. It also places a layer between you and the price you end up paying, which is why this review spends less time on the marketing and more on what Funding Options’ own terms and product pages say, including the several places where they say two different things.

Funding Options at a Glance

Our Verdict

If your business has already decided it wants debt finance and you do not know which lender to approach, Funding Options is a reasonable first stop. One enquiry reaches a large panel, the initial quote does not touch your credit score, and the customer feedback on the human side of the service is genuinely strong: 4.8 out of 5 from 1,455 Trustpilot reviews when we checked on 21 August 2026, with the named Business Finance Specialists praised over and over.

Two things stop us recommending it without qualification. The first is scope: Funding Options brokers debt and asset-backed finance only, so equity, angel investment and innovation grants fall outside it, and Swoop covers that ground where Funding Options cannot. The second is money. Funding Options’ own terms state that lenders pay it commission at different rates and that, for certain lenders, it has some influence over the interest rate, and that this can affect what you pay. That is the company’s own disclosure, not our inference, and it is the reason we tell you further down to price at least one offer against the same lender direct.

Best For

• Trading businesses that want one comparison across a wide panel instead of several separate applications
• Owners who need invoice finance, asset finance or a revolving facility rather than a plain term loan
• Directors who want a human adviser attached to a larger or more awkward application
• Tide business banking customers, who reach the same marketplace from inside an account they already use

Not Ideal For

• Businesses looking for equity, angel investment or innovation grants, none of which Funding Options brokers
• Owners who already know which lender they want and would rather deal with it directly
• Complex property development finance, where a specialist commercial broker will usually add more
• Anyone who will not check the offer they are given against the same lender’s direct pricing

Key Facts We Verified

• Legal entity: Funding Options Limited, company number 07739337, incorporated 12 August 2011 and active (Companies House, checked 21 August 2026)
• FCA status: Authorised since 30 June 2016 under FRN 727867, with permission for credit broking, not lending. Separately a Registered Account Information Service Provider under FRN 791902 since 23 February 2018, which is what allows the Open Banking step
• Ownership: Tide announced the acquisition on 29 November 2022 and the FCA approved the change of control in February 2023. “Funding Options by Tide” was added to the FCA register as a trading name on 16 April 2026
• Lender panel: Funding Options publishes both 80+ and 120+ and does not reconcile the two (see below)
• Published pricing: rates from 8.2% APR, and a representative example of 9.7% APR on £50,000 over 24 months (fundingoptions.com/business-loans, checked 21 August 2026)
• Cost to the applicant: free to use; Funding Options is paid commission by the lender
• Trustpilot: 4.8 out of 5 from 1,455 reviews, 91% five-star and 3% one-star (checked 21 August 2026)

Funding Options Transparency Check

What Is Funding Options by Tide?

Funding Options Is a Broker, Not a Lender

Funding Options sits between your business and the lenders on its panel. You submit one set of information; the platform matches it against what each lender will consider, and returns the offers that clear those filters. Nothing is borrowed from Funding Options and no credit risk sits with it, so the terms, the pricing, the underwriting and the eventual decision all belong to the lender whose name is on the agreement.

The advantage is real. A director who approaches banks one at a time collects a hard search with every application, and a cluster of hard searches in a short period reads badly to whoever looks next. Going through a marketplace replaces that with a single enquiry. The disadvantage is equally real, and it is the one most reviews skip: because the broker is paid by the lender rather than by you, its commercial interest is in a completed transaction, and its own terms accept that its remuneration arrangements can reach the rate you are quoted.

Funding Options and Tide

Tide announced its acquisition of Funding Options on 29 November 2022 and the FCA approved the change of control in February 2023. The consideration was not disclosed at the time, and we found no credible public figure for it, so we do not quote one. Funding Options kept its own legal entity, its own FCA authorisations and its own brand, and in April 2026 registered “Funding Options by Tide” as a trading name.

For a borrower the ownership matters in two small ways. Tide business banking customers can start a funding enquiry from inside an account they already hold, and the parent company gives the platform more corporate ballast than a standalone aggregator has. Neither changes the broker economics or the lender panel, and neither belongs in your decision about whether the offer in front of you is a good one.

It matters in one larger way, and this is the part that catches people out: “Tide” now covers two quite different kinds of borrowing. Alongside the marketplace, Tide lends in its own right. Its Instant Loan and Credit Flex products both come from Tide Capital III Limited rather than from any panel lender, both are fixed-term borrowing rather than a revolving facility, and both require a personal guarantee from a director, which puts your own money behind the debt in a way a marketplace introduction does not. Tide separately runs a referral route to the government Start Up Loan, where the application goes to the Start Up Loans Company and so does the money. We checked all three against Tide’s own terms and help-centre pages on 24 August 2026.

None of those are Funding Options products, and a quote from one tells you nothing about the other. Our Tide business loans review covers what each of them costs, what you have to guarantee, and which company is actually doing the lending.

How Funding Options Works

Application and Matching Process

You start online, or from inside the Tide app, with the basics: legal structure, trading history, monthly revenue, how much you want and what it is for. The platform then asks you to connect your business bank account through Open Banking, and runs your profile against the criteria each lender on the panel has agreed to share. Straightforward products, such as unsecured loans, revolving credit and invoice finance, are handled largely automatically. Anything larger or more awkward, and a Business Finance Specialist picks up the phone before lenders are approached.

It is worth being precise about what the match actually is. Clearing the platform’s filters means a lender is willing to look at you. It does not mean that lender has approved anything. Underwriting happens afterwards, at the lender, against criteria that are stricter than the ones used to decide whether to show you the offer in the first place.

Open Banking and What You Need to Provide

The Open Banking connection is central to the model, and it is the reason Funding Options holds a second FCA registration: FRN 791902 records it as a Registered Account Information Service Provider, which is the permission needed to read your bank transactions with your consent. For simple facilities that read-only feed plus your application answers is often enough to generate offers, and it saves you downloading and uploading statements.

Bigger and secured facilities need more. Expect to hand over two to three years of statutory accounts, management accounts for the current period, and whatever else the individual lender asks for; asset finance lenders will usually want a quote or specification for the equipment as well. None of this is unusual, but it is the stage where applications stall, and how quickly you answer is the single thing most under your control.

How Long Offers and Funding Take

For unsecured lending and invoice finance, initial offers generally come back within 24 to 48 hours of a completed application. Funding Options publishes two records on its lender-partners page: a fastest completed case of 18 minutes from enquiry to funds in the account, and 20 seconds from enquiry to approval. Those are best cases and the company presents them as such.

A realistic expectation is several days to a fortnight, depending on the product, the lender’s workload and how fast documents arrive. Commercial mortgages and development finance run to weeks or months, because the surveying and legal work does not compress. The speed Funding Options genuinely delivers is at the matching stage; everything after that moves at the lender’s pace, not the platform’s.

How Many Lenders Does Funding Options Compare?

The 80+ vs 120+ Lender Discrepancy

Funding Options publishes two lender counts at the same time, and we could not find anything on its site that reconciles them. On 21 August 2026 its business loans page was titled “Compare 80+ Lenders in Minutes” and told applicants “Get access to 80+ lenders”. The site navigation on that same page, under “Lender Partners”, said: “We work with over 120 leading lenders offering the widest range of finance products available.” The lender-partners page itself repeats the higher number: “we work with over 120 finance providers”.

The pattern suggests the 80+ figure is aimed at borrowers and the 120+ figure at lenders being recruited onto the panel, but Funding Options does not say that, and we are not going to invent an explanation on its behalf. A previous version of this review told readers the two numbers meant active integrations and the full panel respectively. There was no evidence for that, and we have removed it.

What the Panel Size Means for Applicants

In practice the total matters far less than it appears to. No applicant is shown 80 lenders, let alone 120. You are shown the handful whose criteria your business clears, which for most SMEs is a single-figure number and for a business with a patchy record may be one or two. Panel size is a measure of how wide the net can be cast, not of how many offers land in front of you.

So treat the headline count as marketing and ask a narrower question instead: does the panel include lenders that will actually consider a business like yours? Funding Options names Funding Circle, Nucleus Commercial Finance and YouLend among its partners, and the British Business Bank appears on the same page in connection with government-backed lending. Beyond that the full list is not published, so do not assume that every lender associated with the wider network is reachable through your own application.

Funding Options Loans and Finance Available

Business Loans and Revolving Credit

Term lending is the core of it. Funding Options quotes unsecured loans from £1,000 to £500,000 and secured facilities up to £20 million, over terms it describes as running from one month to 30 years, though the ordinary range for a business loan is three months to five years. Unsecured deals suit businesses with a trading record and steady revenue; secured deals, backed by an asset or a personal guarantee, unlock larger sums or better rates for those who can offer collateral.

Revolving credit facilities work like an overdraft: a limit is agreed, and you draw and repay against it, paying interest only on what you use. If your cash flow swings with the seasons, that flexibility is worth more than a slightly lower headline rate on a fixed-term loan, because a term loan demands the same repayment in the quiet months as in the busy ones.

Invoice Finance, Asset Finance and Merchant Cash Advances

Invoice finance is one of the stronger parts of the offer, and the choice within it usually comes down to whether you mind your customers knowing. Factoring releases a share of an unpaid invoice straight away and hands collection to the provider, so your customers deal with them; discounting advances the same money and leaves credit control with you.

Asset finance spreads the cost of machinery, vehicles or equipment over a fixed term instead of draining working capital in one go, as hire purchase where you own the asset at the end, or as a lease where you hand it back.

Merchant cash advances are a different animal: you repay a percentage of daily card takings rather than a fixed monthly sum, which flexes with a bad month but usually costs more overall. They suit hospitality and retail with heavy card volumes, and B2B businesses hardly at all. If you are weighing one, read our guide to factor rates and how they compare with APR first, because the two are not comparable on their face.

Property Finance and Government-Backed Lending

Commercial mortgages, bridging and development finance are all on the panel, and all of them are slower and heavier on documentation than unsecured lending. Funding Options can surface relevant lenders, but on a commercial mortgage specifically a specialist broker who negotiates terms directly will often earn their fee, and we would not treat a marketplace match as the end of the search.

Government-backed lending runs through the Growth Guarantee Scheme, which remains open and can support facilities of up to £2 million. Two points about it are routinely misunderstood. The 70% guarantee protects the lender, not you. The British Business Bank states plainly that the borrower always remains 100% liable for the debt. And accreditation changes nothing about the decision: lenders apply their own credit and fraud checks, and a scheme-backed application can be declined like any other.

One gap is worth naming. Funding Options does not broker equity. If venture capital, angel investment or an innovation grant would suit your position better than borrowing, the platform cannot help, and the comparison section below covers who can.

Funding Options Eligibility

Who Can Apply

Funding Options itself sets no minimum turnover and no minimum trading history for making an enquiry. The filters live with the lenders, which is why the platform will take details from almost any UK business and then show a much shorter list than the panel size implies. Keep those two stages separate in your head: being able to apply through the marketplace and being approved by a lender are different events, and only the second one produces money.

What the lenders actually look at is unremarkable and consistent across the market: that the business is UK-based and the applicant old enough to borrow, annual turnover, how long you have traded, whether you are profitable, personal and business credit history, and what security or personal guarantee you can offer. A weak showing on any one of those narrows the list rather than closing it, because challenger and alternative lenders underwrite differently from high-street banks.

Can Startups Apply?

Yes, a startup can submit an enquiry, and some lenders on the panel do take on businesses with little or no trading history. What we will not tell you is where a particular startup gets routed. An earlier version of this review said businesses with no revenue would be directed towards government-backed schemes or Start Up Loans, and Funding Options does not document that, so it has gone.

The honest position is that early-stage businesses see the shortest lists. Funding Options quotes government-backed startup loans of up to £25,000, which tells you the scale most new businesses should expect rather than the six-figure facilities available to established ones.

Can Businesses With Poor Credit Apply?

Yes, and this is one of the better arguments for using a marketplace at all. A decline from your own bank tells you that one lender’s model rejected you; it says nothing about the alternative lenders whose criteria are built around different risks. Several Trustpilot reviewers describe exactly that sequence: turned down by the bank, funded through the panel.

Set your expectations on price, though, rather than on access. Lenders that accept impaired credit charge for it, and the gap between a clean-credit rate and an adverse-credit one is wide enough that the total cost of borrowing, not the monthly payment, is the number to compare.

Does Funding Options Affect Your Credit Score?

Checking Your Initial Options

Funding Options states that it does not: the quote form carries the line “This quote won’t affect your credit score”, and the homepage says “Applying won’t affect your credit score”. That is the outcome you can rely on at the enquiry stage, and it is the reason a marketplace beats making four separate applications yourself.

We have deliberately stopped short of the claim this review used to make, which was that Funding Options runs a soft search across the panel during matching. Its public documentation does not set out which organisation performs which search at which point, and turning an inconsistent set of provider pages into a definitive technical account of the credit-file mechanics is not something we can evidence. What is documented is the consumer outcome, and the consumer outcome is what matters here.

What Happens If You Continue With a Lender

Once you decide to proceed, you are dealing with the lender rather than the marketplace, and lenders carry out their own credit searches as part of underwriting. Expect a hard search at that point, recorded on your file and visible to anyone who looks afterwards.

The practical gain is one deliberate hard search instead of several scattered ones. That is a genuine benefit, but it arrives at the end of the process rather than the start, so do not read “no impact on your credit score” as covering the whole journey. It covers the part before you commit.

Funding Options Rates, Fees and Commission

Current Published Rates

Funding Options advertises rates from 8.2% APR, and publishes a representative example of 9.7% APR on a £50,000 loan over 24 months: monthly repayments of £2,291.56 and £54,997.44 payable in total. Its homepage calculator uses a slightly different illustration, 10.0% APR on the same £50,000 over 24 months, giving £2,307.25 a month and £55,373.91 in total. Both figures were on the site on 21 August 2026.

Read these as advertised reference points and nothing more. The “from” rate is the best price the best-qualified applicants get, a representative APR only has to be available to a proportion of borrowers, and the actual price comes from the lender you end up with, based on your accounts and your security. Funding Options also flags that “some lenders may apply fees during the application process”, which is a reminder that the APR is not always the whole cost.

Does Funding Options Charge Businesses?

No. There is no application fee, no membership charge and nothing payable for receiving matched offers. The company’s terms put it plainly: “the Service is free of charge to you”.

The finance itself costs whatever the lender charges: interest, arrangement fees, and on invoice finance a discount charge. Those are set by and paid to the lender.

How Funding Options Earns Commission

Funding Options is paid by the lenders. Its terms state: “While the Service is free of charge to you, we will receive commission from Finance Providers for introductions we make to them.” The commission falls due when an introduction turns into finance, which is normal for credit brokers and is disclosed rather than hidden.

The part worth reading twice is the next sentence: lenders “could pay commission at different rates”. That means the panel is not economically flat. Different lenders are worth different amounts to the broker, and that is the fact everything in the following section rests on.

Can Funding Options’ Commission Affect the Rate You Pay?

Funding Options says it can. Its terms continue: “for certain lenders we have some influence over the interest rate”, and “this can impact the amount that you pay under any agreement you may choose to enter into”. That is the company’s own disclosure, written into the document you accept when you use the service.

What it does not say is that any particular offer has been marked up, and we are not claiming that. There is no evidence in front of us that a given quote is worse than the same lender would give you directly, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

But the mechanism is admitted, it applies to an unspecified subset of lenders, and it is precisely the sort of thing a borrower is entitled to know before treating a broker’s quote as the market price. An earlier version of this review told readers that commission comes out of the lender’s margin and is not added to the borrower’s rate. Funding Options’ own terms do not support that, and we have removed it.

You do have one lever. On a regulated credit agreement, the terms give you the right to ask what commission Funding Options will receive before you sign, or the likely amount if the exact figure is not yet known. Most business lending sits outside consumer credit regulation, so that right may not formally apply to your agreement. Ask anyway, and treat the answer, or the refusal, as information.

Should You Compare the Same Lender Directly?

Yes, at least once, on the offer you are seriously considering. It costs an hour and it is the only way to find out whether the marketplace price and the direct price are the same. Do not assume direct is cheaper: brokers negotiate volume terms that individual applicants cannot, and going around them sometimes costs more, not less.

Compare on the whole agreement rather than the headline, because a lower rate attached to a bigger arrangement fee is not a better deal. Work through:

• APR, and the nominal interest rate where the two differ
• Arrangement, facility and drawdown fees, and any broker fee charged separately
• Total amount repayable, the one number that settles most comparisons
• Term and repayment frequency, including whether repayments are monthly, weekly or a share of card takings
• Early-settlement terms, and whether interest is rebated if you clear the balance early
• Security and personal guarantees, which is where your house can end up attached to the deal
• Whether the lender will deal with you directly at all, since some lend only through intermediaries

Compare Your Offer Across the Panel

Funding Options Customer Reviews

Current Trustpilot Rating

Funding Options by Tide held 4.8 out of 5 across 1,455 Trustpilot reviews when we checked on 21 August 2026, rated Excellent. The distribution is 91% five-star, 5% four-star and 3% one-star, with the middle bands almost empty. That is the shape of a service people either sail through or get stuck in. Trustpilot also records that the company invites customers to review and responds to 70% of negative ones.

Be clear about what a score like that can and cannot establish. It is good evidence about how the service feels to deal with: the speed, the communication, whether anyone calls back. It is not evidence that the matching is neutral, that commission has no effect on pricing, or that any individual borrower was shown the best offer available to them. An earlier version of this review argued that a platform could not hold a 4.8 rating if commission incentives were affecting recommendations. That inference does not follow from review data, and it has gone.

What Customers Like

The recurring praise is about people rather than technology. Reviewers name their Business Finance Specialist, individually and by name, again and again, and describe questions answered within minutes and someone chasing the lender on their behalf. The second theme is the outcome for businesses that had already been turned down elsewhere and found a lender through the panel that their own bank’s model had ruled out.

Speed comes third: offers back inside a day or two, and a process that avoids repeating the same information to four different lenders.

Common Complaints

Critical reviews are a small minority, and they cluster in three places. Some applicants are declined by the matched lenders as well and end up back where they started, having spent time and disclosed a good deal of financial information. Others describe communication going quiet at the handover from platform to lender, when responsibility moves and it is not always obvious who is now dealing with the file. A third group, usually on larger or more complex facilities, felt the intermediary added administration without adding much they could not have arranged themselves.

The first of those is not really a criticism of the platform. No marketplace can produce a lender for a business that no lender will take, and a business that falls outside every set of criteria on the panel will not be funded by better matching. What the platform controls is the odds and the effort; it does not control the answer.

Is Funding Options Safe and Regulated?

FCA Regulation

Funding Options Limited is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference number 727867, and has been since 30 June 2016. We checked the register on 21 August 2026: the permission recorded is credit broking. That is the whole of it. Funding Options is not authorised to lend, and it cannot hold or control client money.

A second entry, FRN 791902, records Funding Options Limited as a Registered Account Information Service Provider since 23 February 2018. That is the Open Banking permission, and it is what lets the platform read your bank transactions once you consent. One detail is off, though it changes nothing practical: Funding Options’ own site cites this registration under the Electronic Money Regulations, while the FCA register files it under payment services. The permission is real; the reference on the company’s footer is not.

Being FCA-authorised regulates the broking. It says nothing about whether a lender on the panel is regulated, and much commercial lending to limited companies is not. Check the lender’s own status before you sign, because the protections attached to the introduction do not automatically extend to the loan.

Company Ownership

Funding Options Limited was incorporated on 12 August 2011 and remains active, registered at 4th Floor, The Featherstone Building, 66 City Road, London EC1Y 2AL. Tide has owned it since the acquisition completed with FCA approval in February 2023, and it continues to operate as a separate authorised entity rather than being folded into Tide’s own permissions.

Complaints and Financial Ombudsman Eligibility

Complain to Funding Options first, and give it up to eight weeks to resolve matters. If that fails, you may be able to escalate, but not automatically, and the qualification is the part most reviews leave out.

The Financial Ombudsman Service takes complaints from micro-enterprises and from businesses meeting its small-business test: annual turnover under £6.5 million, together with either fewer than 50 employees or a balance sheet total under £5 million. A business above those thresholds has no right of referral, whatever the merits of its complaint, and will be left with the courts. Complaints about a lender’s product or its lending decision go to that lender first, and the same eligibility test applies there.

What We Independently Verified

Everything below was checked against a primary source on 21 August 2026. Where Funding Options is the only source for a figure, we say so rather than presenting it as verified.

One finding shows better than any other why a marketplace’s own statistics deserve care. Funding Options’ business loans page carries “supporting 17,000+ SMEs and more than £1bn funded” in its introduction and “Trusted by over 43,000 customers” with “over £1.6 bn in funding” further down the same page, while its about-us page says “more than 15,000 businesses” and “over £0.7B in funding for businesses in the UK and the Netherlands”. The three sets may count different populations over different periods. Funding Options does not say, so neither do we, and no version of this review should be quoting any of them as settled fact.

Funding Options vs Alternatives

Funding Options vs Swoop

Swoop is the closest comparison: another UK credit broker, free to the applicant, paid a commission by the finance provider when a placement completes. The difference is scope. Swoop introduces businesses to equity funds and grant bodies as well as lenders, so it covers the ground Funding Options does not reach at all.

If you have already settled on borrowing, that breadth buys you nothing and Funding Options is the more focused route. If you are still deciding between debt and equity, or there is any chance an innovation grant fits what you are doing, start with Swoop. Using both for a debt search costs nothing beyond your time, and neither initial enquiry touches your credit file.

Funding Options vs Funding Circle

Funding Circle is a lender, not a marketplace, and it is named on Funding Options’ own partners page, so the same company may appear at the end of a Funding Options search. It advertises loans of £10,000 to £750,000 over six months to six years, with rates from 6.9% a year, and lets you get a decision without affecting your credit score.

That makes it the cleanest test of whether the marketplace is earning its commission on your deal. If a Funding Options search returns a Funding Circle offer, get a direct quote as well and put the two total repayable figures side by side. If they match, the broker has cost you nothing and saved you effort. If they do not, you have learned something worth knowing before you sign.

Funding Options vs iwoca

iwoca lends its own money too, and its Flexi-Loan runs from £1,000 to £1 million over one to five years, with interest charged only on the balance you are actually using. Its published representative APR is 49%, which is a long way from the 8.2% Funding Options advertises as its starting point. The two are not really competing for the same borrower, and the comparison is a useful reminder that a marketplace’s “from” rate and a specific lender’s representative rate describe different things.

Go direct to iwoca if you already know its flexible structure fits how your cash flow behaves and you value drawing down in stages. Go through a marketplace if you want to see what a fixed-term loan from a cheaper lender would cost before committing to that structure. iwoca is not among the partners Funding Options names publicly, so do not count on its offers appearing in a marketplace search.

When Applying Directly May Make More Sense

Going direct is the better move in three situations. The first is when you already know the lender you want, because a broker adds a handover and a commission to a decision you have made. The second is when your own bank has a relationship with you worth using. Years of account history and a manager who knows the business can beat any algorithm’s read of your file. The third is when the finance is specialist enough that expertise beats breadth: development finance and complex commercial mortgages generally reward a broker who negotiates individual terms over a platform that matches criteria.

Everywhere else, the marketplace does something you cannot easily do yourself, which is to canvass a market without leaving a trail of hard searches behind you. Use it for that, then check the offer you like against its own lender before you sign.

Verdict: Should You Use Funding Options?

For a UK business that wants debt finance and has not settled on a lender, yes, as the first move rather than the last one. One enquiry, no effect on your credit score at the quote stage, a wide panel and, on the evidence of 1,455 Trustpilot reviews, advisers who actually pick up the phone. For businesses turned down by their own bank, it is the most efficient way to find out whether anyone else will lend.

Two limits define how far to trust it. It brokers debt only, so equity and grants need Swoop or a specialist adviser. And its own terms record that lenders pay it different rates of commission and that, for some of them, it has influence over the interest rate you are offered. That is a disclosure the company makes and we take at face value. Nothing in front of us suggests any particular quote has been inflated, but it is the reason to price one offer directly against its lender before accepting.

The last thing to keep in proportion is the marketing. Funding Options publishes two lender counts and three sets of funding statistics without reconciling any of them, and none of those numbers tells you anything about the offer you will actually receive. Judge it on the terms you are given, not on the size of the panel.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How many lenders are on the Funding Options panel?

  Funding Options publishes two figures and does not reconcile them. When we checked on 21 August 2026, its business loans page said “80+ lenders” while the site navigation on the same page and its lender-partners page both said “over 120”. The higher number appears in material aimed at lenders joining the panel and the lower one in material aimed at borrowers, but Funding Options does not explain the difference. Either way, no applicant is shown the whole panel. You see only the lenders whose criteria your business clears, which is usually a handful.

• Does Funding Options charge a fee?

  Not to you. Funding Options’ terms state that “the Service is free of charge to you”, and there is no application or membership charge. It is paid commission by the lender when an introduction results in finance. Its terms add that lenders “could pay commission at different rates” and that for certain lenders Funding Options has “some influence over the interest rate”, which “can impact the amount that you pay”. The finance itself carries the lender’s own interest and fees.

• Does using Funding Options affect your credit score?

  Funding Options says checking your options does not: its quote form carries the line “This quote won’t affect your credit score”. That covers the enquiry and matching stage. If you go on to proceed with one of the lenders, that lender will carry out its own credit searches as part of underwriting, and you should expect a hard search recorded on your file at that point. The benefit of the marketplace is one deliberate hard search instead of several from applying to lenders separately.

• Can startups use Funding Options?

  Yes. Funding Options sets no minimum turnover or trading history for making an enquiry; those requirements sit with the individual lenders. In practice a startup will see a much shorter list of options than an established business, and at smaller amounts. Funding Options quotes government-backed startup loans of up to £25,000. Being shown an option is not approval: the lender still underwrites the application against its own criteria.

• Can you complain about Funding Options to the Financial Ombudsman?

  Only if your business qualifies. Complain to Funding Options first and allow it up to eight weeks. After that, the Financial Ombudsman Service can consider complaints from micro-enterprises and from small businesses with an annual turnover under £6.5 million that also have either fewer than 50 employees or a balance sheet total under £5 million. Larger businesses have no right of referral. Complaints about a lender’s product or lending decision go to that lender, subject to the same eligibility test.

• How long does Funding Options take to arrange finance?

  Initial matched offers on standard debt products usually come back within 24 to 48 hours of a completed application with an Open Banking connection. Funding Options publishes a fastest case of 18 minutes from enquiry to funds in the account, and 20 seconds from enquiry to approval; both are records rather than typical outcomes. Most completions take several days to a couple of weeks, and commercial mortgages or development finance take weeks to months.

• Do you need a Tide business account to use Funding Options?

  No. Funding Options takes enquiries from any UK business that meets a lender’s criteria, and holding a Tide account is not one of those criteria. Tide customers get a shortcut rather than an advantage: the enquiry starts inside an app they already use, with some business details carried across. The lenders you are matched with, the commission arrangements and the rate you are quoted are the same either way. Tide’s own Instant Loan and Credit Flex do require a Tide account, but those are Tide products rather than marketplace ones.

How We Reviewed Funding Options