Funding Circle plc: Full Year 2025 Results

Funding Circle Holdings plc

Full Year 2025 Results

FY 2026 REVENUE GUIDANCE ACHIEVED A YEAR EARLY

UPGRADED FY 2026 GUIDANCE & ATTRACTIVE NEW MEDIUM-TERM TARGETS

Funding Circle Holdings plc (“Funding Circle” or the “Group”) today announces results for the twelve months ended 31 December 2025.

Lisa Jacobs, Funding Circle CEO, commented:
"We delivered a standout performance in 2025, exceeding our expectations and hitting our 2026 revenue guidance a year early, and we supported more SMEs than ever before. Strong growth in the credit we extended led to revenue growth of 28% to £204m and profit before tax increasing to £20m, demonstrating the strong operating leverage and profitability of our platform.

“We’ve successfully executed against our strategy to deepen our engagement with SMEs and expand our multi-product offering, enabling us to meet more of our customers’ needs. We now interact with a customer once every 38 seconds, putting us at the heart of their businesses as a trusted financial partner. Our 15 years of proprietary data and technology expertise are the foundation of our competitive advantage, allowing us to deliver a superior customer experience.

“Looking ahead, we see a significant opportunity to further grow our share of the SME finance market. Our confidence in the strength and scalability of our platform is reflected in the attractive new medium-term targets we are setting today. By becoming a more meaningful partner to our customers, we aim to not only grow our business but to support the next phase of growth across the UK’s SME economy."

Financial Highlights

• Group Revenue: Increased 28% to £204.3m (2024: £160.1m), achieving 2026 revenue guidance a year early.
• Profitability: Significant 6x growth in Profit Before Tax (PBT) to £20.3m, up from £3.4m pre-exceptionals and £0.8m post exceptionals in 2024 demonstrating the business’ operating leverage. Profit for the year (after exceptional items) of £46.0m (2024: £8.6m).
• Credit Extended: Increased 29% to £2,453m (2024: £1,899m).
• Assets under Management (AuM): Increased to £2,961m (2024: £2,833m).
• Active customers: Increased 10% to 52.7k (2024: 47.9k).

Business Unit Performance

Term Loans

• Originations: Grew 16% to £1,638m (2024: £1,407m) driven by product innovation and borrower demand.
• AuM: Increased to £2,755m (2024: £2,714m) as new lending outpaced the repayment of legacy Covid-19 government-guaranteed loans.
• Profitability: PBT increased to £32.2m (2024: £19.0m before exceptional items), reflecting strong operating leverage which led to margins improving to 19.2% (2024: 13.3%).
• Robust and attractive returns through the cycle: Annualised net returns to institutional investors continued to be ~5% above cost of capital, resulting in continued investor demand with £2.2bn in committed forward flows.

1. Credit extended includes Term Loan originations and FlexiPay and Cashback card transactions.
2. Assets under Management (“AuM”) is the total value of term loan principal and interest due from borrowers and drawn lines of credit and Cashback card spend balances (excluding defaulted balances) previously referred to as Loans under Management and balances outstanding.
3. Net income is also referred to as “Revenue”.
4. Unrestricted cash refers to total cash less cash that is restricted in use.

FlexiPay & Card

• Transactions: Strong momentum with transactions growing 66% to £815m (2024: £492m), reflecting good customer engagement and roll-out of new features. >80% revenue from prior cohorts.
• AuM: Increased 73% to £206m (2024: £119m) as a result of new and repeat usage from customers.
• Performance: Continued progress toward profitability with a reduced loss before tax of £11.9m (2024: £15.6m loss before exceptional items). Expected credit losses remain in line with our expectations.

Capital Allocation & Cash

Unrestricted cash remained healthy at £100.9m (2024: £150.5m) following proactive deployment aligned to our capital allocation framework:

• Deliver: Group cash generative; Term Loan profits successfully funded continued FlexiPay investment.
• Invest: R&D for development of new shorter-term loan product within our Term Loans business, which has resulted in an institutional investor onboarded in January 2026 to fund future originations. The existing shorter-term loan portfolio was sold in line with its carrying value.
• Distribute: A third share buyback of up to £25m was announced in 2025. Combined with earlier programmes, £64m has been returned to shareholders across 2024 and 2025, with £11m remaining. In 2025 specifically, £30m was deployed for buybacks and £9m for the employee benefit trust.

Operational & Strategic Progress

• Powerful data driving risk discrimination: Our AI-powered credit models are 3x better at discriminating risk than traditional bureau scores. 15 years of proprietary data including 10 billion data points feeds our model development, deepens the competitive moat around the business, and enables us to say "yes" to more businesses.
• Differentiated technology: Our instant decision technology enhances the customer experience and our platform allows for fast product development and new feature launches.
• High customer satisfaction & strong brand awareness: With an NPS (Term Loans) of 79 and Trustpilot score of 4.6, our brand reputation drives consideration amongst our target market of 80%.
• Strong track record and funding pipeline: Our capital-light platform is built for scale. We have delivered consistent and robust loan returns to our institutional funders, with whom we have long-standing arrangements and £2.2bn of future forward flow capacity in place.
• Multi-product capabilities: We have diversified and expanded our product suite beyond our longer-term loan offering, with c.50% of our credit extended in H2 2025 coming from other products. Nearly 70% of our FlexiPay revenue comes from our existing Term Loan customers, as we deepen engagement and capture a larger share of our customers’ financing needs. We are also attracting new audiences to the Funding Circle ecosystem. 50% of our Card customers are new to Funding Circle and our new shorter-term lending product has unlocked previously untapped segments of the SME market.
• Engaged and talented team: Our mission-led culture is a differentiator. We achieved a record engagement of 74% in 2025 and our teams received 11 industry awards, including the NACFB Unsecured Lender of the Year for the seventh consecutive year.
• Meaningful impact: In 2025, lending through Funding Circle supported over 117,000 jobs and contributed £7.9bn to UK GDP. Every £1 million of lending through our platform contributed £2.7 million to GDP, 39 jobs and £700,000 in tax revenue.

Looking ahead
Our strategic priorities are focused on customer-led profitable growth:

• Get to yes: Get the right product to the right business, through credit excellence and product improvements.
• Expand our audience: Target new segments; deepen and expand our distribution channels.
• Scale our products: Capitalise on the large market opportunity by focusing on refining and scaling our products to drive growth and margin expansion.
• Build a seamless lifetime customer experience: Deliver an exceptional experience throughout our customers’ lifetime journey with our expanded product set, as their trusted financial partner.

These will deliver customer-led top-line growth and increased profit within our current product set over the coming years, while enabling the next phase of longer-term growth with continued investment in our product and technology capabilities. We are building powerful insights into our customers that provide a strong platform for growth beyond our existing product set as we become our customers’ trusted financial partner.

Guidance

We have upgraded our FY26 guidance having achieved our previous revenue target a year early. We are also establishing new medium-term targets through to FY29:

Analyst presentation
Management will host a presentation and conference call for institutional investors and analysts at 9:30am UK time (GMT), on Thursday 5 March 2026.

To watch and listen to the webcast, with the opportunity to submit written questions, please use this link to register and gain access to the event.

For conference call access, please dial +44 33 0551 0200 or +1 786 697 3501 Quote ‘Funding Circle FY25’ when prompted by the operator.

An on-demand replay and transcript will also be available on the Funding Circle website following the presentation.

For further details:

Funding Circle Holdings plc       ir@fundingcircle.com  press@fundingcircle.com

Lisa Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer    

Tony Nicol, Chief Financial Officer

Headland Consultancy

Stephen Malthouse and Jack Gault (+44 20 3805 4822)

Forward looking statements and other important information:

This document contains forward looking statements, which are statements that are not historical facts and that reflect Funding Circle’s beliefs and expectations with respect to future events and financial and operational performance. These forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, estimates and other factors, which may be beyond the control of Funding Circle and which may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied from such forward looking statements.  Nothing contained within this document is or should be relied upon as a warranty, promise or representation, express or implied, as to the future performance of Funding Circle or its business. Any historical information contained in this statistical information is not indicative of future performance.

The information contained in this document is provided as of the dates shown.  Nothing in this document should be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or accounting advice, or solicitation for or an offer to invest in Funding Circle. 

About us:

Funding Circle (LSE: FCH) is the UK’s leading SME finance platform. Since 2010, we have extended more than £17bn in credit to over 125,000 UK businesses, helping them power the economy and their communities.

By combining proprietary AI-powered credit models with a human touch, we provide a seamless experience that allows SMEs to borrow, pay later, and spend through a single ecosystem. For institutional investors, Funding Circle offers access to an attractive, underserved asset class through a platform built on deep data and a proven track record of robust returns.

Business Review

It has been a standout year for Funding Circle. We supported more small businesses than ever before, grew revenue 28% to £204 million, achieving our medium-term revenue target a year ahead of schedule, grew profit before tax (“PBT”) to over £20 million and achieved record Circler engagement.

In 2024, we launched our plan to become a simpler, leaner, and UK-focused multi-product business, and, after two years of strong execution, we are realising the benefits. Our performance was driven by new product innovation and strong demand, underpinned by the power of our proprietary data and technology and capital-light business model.

Our position as the UK’s leading SME finance platform is stronger than ever. We are serving a large and underserved market, enabling businesses to borrow, pay later, and spend, delivering a superior customer experience and attractive returns to our platform investors. And, we’re still just getting started.

Business finance that backs small businesses

For 15 years, we have backed the small businesses that keep the UK economy moving. We have extended c.£17 billion of credit to over 125,000 UK businesses.

We’re passionate about what we do - the businesses we support are the restaurants, popcorn makers, furniture manufacturers and flooring suppliers. They sit at the heart of local communities, driving growth and creating jobs and it’s an honour to play a small but important part in their stories.

In 2025, lending through Funding Circle supported 117,000 jobs, £7.9 billion in GDP contribution and £2.2 billion in tax receipts. We once again lent to businesses in every one of the country’s 650 constituencies, powering tens of thousands of SMEs.

As we have diversified our product set, it has been pleasing to see the impact, we now offer over ten different products, we have a customer transaction every 38 seconds (vs every half an hour in 2021), and in H2 last year, 50% of our credit extended came from outside our core term loan products.

We remain capital-light with a robust balance sheet. We are continuing to return value to shareholders through share buybacks, having purchased 17% of our initial share capital since March 2024, while maintaining a strong cash position to support growth.

Strategic progress: borrow, pay later, spend

Over the last few years, we have executed against our multi-product strategy, driving an expanded customer set, an increased share of wallet and deeper customer engagement. Today, we are a more important part of our customers’ lives.

We are executing against our four strategic pillars to drive profitable growth:

1. Get to ‘Yes’: Expanding our product offering, improving our customer service and our credit segmentation to get to ‘Yes’ for more businesses. This year we reorganised our sales teams to better serve customers’ financial holistic needs, launched a shorter-term loan product, and further expanded our Marketplace partnerships to support those we cannot fund directly.

2. Expand our audience: Through new distribution channels and product sets, we are broadening the range of customers we can serve and attract. Our Cashback card is bringing new customers into the Funding Circle ecosystem. We continue to invest in our existing direct and intermediated distribution channels and our new partnership with TNT Sports, building on our existing partnership with Gallagher PREM Rugby, will also put Funding Circle in front of new SME audiences.

3. Scale our product offering: We are driving our newer products, FlexiPay and Cashback card, towards scale and profitability. We have made good progress building out product features to offer more flexibility for customers.

4. Build a seamless lifetime customer experience: We are serving our customers across a broader set of needs and by solving more problems for our customers, we are laying the foundations for long-term relationships as their trusted financial partner.

Our technology and data advantage

When we speak to our customers, they want fast and easy access to credit with a human touch. In a small business, the owners are the operators, the marketers and the financiers. We provide a six minute application form, instant decisions for 73% of applicants, and funding in as little as 24 hours. This drives strong satisfaction with an NPS (Term Loans) of 79 and lets customers focus on what they do best, running their businesses.

We can do this thanks to our data and technology, which delivers a competitive advantage. Our AI-powered risk models are trained with our proprietary data on hundreds of thousands of loans and transactions alongside public data sources, discriminating risk three times better than bureau scores alone.

We continue to invest in our technology and data stack. Gen AI forms part of this as we evolve into an AI-native organisation. We are leveraging AI to improve customer experience and productivity - from better understanding customer sentiment and serving customers faster, to speeding up product development. We are deploying Gen AI thoughtfully and safely with a ‘human in the loop’ approach.

People and culture

Our results and strategic progress are all testament to the hard work of our Circlers. It is their passion, commitment and dedication that means we continue to help more SMEs thrive. We achieved a record employee engagement score of 74% in 2025.

This year, we launched our new ‘People Pact’ reflecting our collective commitment to be all in and ‘On a Mission’ every day to back small businesses, to grow fast, to belong together, to build better, and to be different. At Funding Circle we are on a mission that really matters and ultimately reaps rewards for our Circlers, our customers, our investors and shareholders, and our business.

Looking ahead

We are excited by the potential that we have to continue to become our customers’ trusted financial partner. We enter 2026 with a clear platform for growth as we become a more meaningful part of our customers’ lives, serving more of their needs and capturing a larger share of their financing, to fuel even more SME success stories across the UK.

Financial review

Outperforming expectations and delivering growing PBT

Overview of the year ended 31 December 2025 

We are pleased to report that the Group delivered strong revenue and sustainable profit growth in 2025, demonstrating continued scalability following the move to profitability in 2024. This performance was driven by growth across Term Loans (a longer-term financial product offering) and FlexiPay (a shorter-term line of credit product) which also incorporates the Cashback card (launched in H2 2024), demonstrating the strength of our expanded product suite in meeting the diverse financing needs of SMEs. FlexiPay and the Cashback card are presented as one segment.

While these two business segments are at different stages of maturity, product innovation has remained a driver for both. In our more established Term Loans business, we have successfully expanded our product range to include our shorter-term loan offering. Simultaneously, in our high growth FlexiPay segment, we have continued to iterate on features to deepen customer engagement.

Overall, credit extended grew by 29% to £2.5 billion, with significant growth for Term Loans and FlexiPay. Assets under management grew to £3.0 billion with credit performance in line with management expectations.

Strong credit extended translated into revenue growth of 28% to £204.3 million (2024: £160.1 million), achieving our 2026 revenue guidance a year earlier than expected. The Group made a profit before tax of £20.3 million (2024: profit before tax of £3.4 million before exceptional items, profit before tax of £0.8 million after exceptional items).