Greg Carter

It’s been an excellent year of expansion for Growth Street, says Greg Carter. ‘2019 saw us complete two rounds of funding in the business (totalling £17.5 million), smash the £100 million mark of money we’ve lent to businesses and reach over 2,700 investors. We also launched to borrowers in Scotland, so we are now supporting growing, profitable SMEs across the entire nation.’

Carter and co-founder Thomas Hoegh launched Growth Street in 2014 having seen the difficulty many small firms encounter when seeking finance. The concept is very much of its time, not only in the market it serves but how it serves it, Growth Street being one of the first P2P facilitators to leverage Open Banking and cloud accounting data, thereby creating an alternative to the business overdraft. That has the potential to make them leaders in the sector: ‘By leveraging advanced data science techniques, we have been able to unlock new and better risk management techniques.’

But technological nous is not a substitute for personal, considerate service. Carter has that experience also, having started his career ‘at the worst possible time’ in 2008 in corporate development.

He then advised a family office: ‘[There] I saw the huge opportunity to both unlock more growth in scale-up businesses, and deliver superior returns to a wider network of investments.’