Sancus draws first funding from Honeycomb credit facility

SANCUS BMS Group, the peer-to-peer business lender, has drawn down the first tranche of funding provided by the Honeycomb Investment Trust (HIT) for use on its platform.

The GLI Finance subsidiary will use £17.5m from Honeycomb’s funding facility to expand its property-backed lending activities.

“When we announced that HIT had provided a substantial funding line to Sancus I said that this would facilitate further expansion of our successful property-backed lending facilities,” Andy Whelan, chief executive of GLI and Sancus BMS Group, said in a stock exchange announcement on Wednesday.

“With this first, substantial, draw-down that process has successfully commenced.”

The HIT funding facility was first announced by Aim-listed alternative finance group GLI Finance last month.

The three-year funding line has a £50m revolving credit facility, meaning that GLI has the right to increase its line of credit with the lender.

Sancus announced last month that it has hit the £200m lending milestone, which has helped push lending across all Sancus BMS Group brands to £700m over the past four years.

It recently rebranded the Funding Knight platform as Sancus Funding and realigned its focus towards asset-backed lending, particularly bridging and development finance.