This leaves businesses with huge exposure to rising interest rates, Hadrian’s Wall Capital, the London-based specialist debt adviser,argued.
Just 11% of the£416bnin total stock of loans to businesses are now being provided on a fixed rate–dropping by a third from 18% two years ago.
This leaves businesses with huge exposure to rising interest rates, Hadrian’s Wall Capital, the London-based specialist debt adviser,argued.
The drop came as banks prepared for interest rate rises and de-risked their loan books. Hadrian’s Wall Capital thought this has left businesses dealing with significant uncertainty over their cost of finance and unable to plan corporate finance activity and investment over the coming years.
Marc Bajer, chief executive of Hadrian’s Wall Capital, said: “Now is the time for small businesses to lock in to fixed-rate debt, before interest rates rise again.
“However, fixed-rate loans are now virtually unavailable from banks, and many SMEs are reliant on floating rate debt. Any jump in interest rates could see small businesses burned by their reliance on floating rate loans.
“Corporate finance advisers should also consider fixed-rate debt when it comes to their corporate finance activities, so as to reduce the threat to them and to their clients, of rising interest rates.
“When interest rates rise, small businesses are likely to suffer financial damage - arise in the base rate to just 1.5% would cost UK small business billions.”
The firm said that fixed-rate loans are now increasingly difficult for businesses to obtain – especially for small and medium enterprises.
The expected further rise in interest rates of 0.25% in the coming months will cost British SMEs another£355m in interest payments in the first year alone.
Data provided by the Bank of England showed that in 2012, the share of all bank loans to businesses had a fixed-rate as high as 49%.
Hadrian’s Wall Capital said the consequences of both the Credit Crisis and the swaps mis-selling scandal has meant that SMEs are now extremely wary of using swap products.
Additionally, SMEs also have great difficulty in obtaining approval from any institution to fix the interest rate on their loans using swaps, removing another layer of protection from rate rises for businesses.
With interest rates now on the rise, there is a risk that SME growth planning and corporate finance activity could be shelved for the present, as businesses choose to wait for less uncertainty over the costs of floating rate debt.
Hadrian’s Wall Capital said it is important to continuously revitalise UK business by giving them un-interrupted access to debt refinancing,MBO’s and MBI’s.
Fixed-rate lending for such corporate finance activities can help to reduce the risk of rising interest rates to these SMEs.
The growing shortage of fixed-rate bank lending to SMEs has led Hadrian’s Wall Secured Investments to focus on providing long term, fixed-rate, non-callable loans to SMEs, giving them intermediate to long-term certainty over their cost of funding.
This enables them to undertake corporate finance transactions and plan long-term programmes of investment in their businesses.
