UK under pressure: how specialist lenders are navigating policy, regulatory and technology disruption
Dedicated streams of content for asset finance and term loans; receivables finance, vendor finance, auto finance and technology.
Three forces are reshaping specialist lending simultaneously. Government is intervening at scale — through the BBB's £25.6bn lending programmes and the Modern Industrial Strategy's eight priority sectors — to drive investment into SMEs and the assets that will define the next decade of the UK economy. Regulation is targeting conduct in intermediary-introduced lending, with the FCA's motor finance redress scheme raising questions that extend well beyond auto finance into any specialist lending vertical where dealers, brokers, or introducers sit between lender and borrower. And AI is moving from experiment to production — bringing genuine efficiency gains, a transformed fraud threat, and accountability questions that senior managers cannot delegate.
UK under pressure brings together senior practitioners across asset finance, equipment finance, auto finance, and receivables finance for a day of structured, lender-centred discussion across three parallel streams.
- Business lending — plugging the gaps in SME lending The government has committed £25.6bn through the British Business Bank, the FCA is consulting on regulatory barriers to SME finance, and the Open Finance Roadmap is reshaping credit data. Our opening plenary — chaired by Christian Roelofs — asks the harder question: is this driving genuinely new lending to underserved SMEs, or primarily subsidising lending that would have happened anyway? Dedicated sessions then take each lending community deeper: an SME customer journey sprint for asset finance, a next-generation platform showcase for receivables finance, and an industrial strategy opportunity analysis for equipment finance lenders.
- Regulation and consumer finance — regulatory turmoil and the desert of innovation Our opening session brings together the CEOs of leading UK auto lenders to explore how the industry responds to geopolitical shocks, Chinese competition, the EV transition, and collapsing brand loyalty at the same moment the DCA redress scheme demands its full attention. A dedicated session examines the redress scheme itself: what lenders now know, what remains uncertain, and how to operationalise the programme. Consumer Credit Act reform rounds out the stream.
- Technology — the birth of the AI era in specialist lending AI adoption in specialist lending is wide but shallow. Our opening plenary maps where lenders genuinely are on the maturity curve, examines the infrastructure constraints that rarely get discussed honestly, and confronts the fraud threat that the same technology has transformed. Dedicated sessions explore agentic AI in credit assessment and the evolving fraud landscape in depth.
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