On 23rd September 2020,Kriya (formerly MarketFinance) was awarded a £10m grant from the Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF), announced by Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR).

The grant was successfully deployed to develop products and create jobs.

Statement

While Kriya has delivered substantial lending (£727m) to the market as part of it's public commitments, we are short of our 2023 year-end target of £1bn. This is a consequence of the government backed lending schemes post-Covid. We are on track to deliver our in-year 2024 target (£555m), the overall impact of the shortfall in 2023 will be a reduction in our overall lending target of £300m (£1.3bn versus £1.6bn cumulative volume by the end of 2024). This is nonetheless a substantial achievement in assisting UK SMEs. We are on track with our recruitment commitment, and have already delivered on our other public commitments.

Our outstanding commitments

As of January 2024 the following deliverables are still outstanding.

2. Expand our offering to SMEs who need it most

Smaller SMEs (<10 employees) comprise >90% of SMEs but are at the greatest borrowing disadvantage. We will expand our target market to better serve these categories (including businesses such as sole traders, low turnover (<£250k), SMEs and startups).

We commit to start lending to at least two of the categories above by Q2-2022.
This will help enable us to lend £550m+ to >2.3k SMEs by 2022. We aim to have lent £1.6bn to 15.5k SMEs by 2024.

Update (January 2024)

To date we have lent more than £725m to more than 4,500 UK SMEs. We forecast lending an additional £555m in 2024 which is consistent with our initial 2024 forecast, however due to the cumulative shortfall to date, we anticipate that we will deliver £1.3bn total lending by the end of 2024 vs. the original commitment of £1.6bn. However, we anticipate that we will still meet our customer numbers target by the end of 2024.

5. Expand our geographic footprint to secure the UK’s best talent

We serve SMEs across the UK and will reflect that in our own geographical footprint creating 50+ jobs outside London by 2022, including in our existing Manchester office. Throughout the next 4 years and beyond we will continue recruiting to support our commitments and aim to create 200+ jobs in total across the UK by 2024.

Update (January 2024)

We are on track to deliver this commitment, having already welcomed more than 150 new team members. Kriya still has a number of open job vacancies which can be found on our website.

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