It’s harder than ever before to access finance. Everyone from ultra-wealthy individuals with multi-million-pound fortunes to successful business owners can find it challenging to borrow capital. Yet, we live in a world where these individuals need to access liquidity more than ever before. Why?
In short, the way business is conducted has changed. As has the way people grow and protect wealth. For example, high-net-worth individuals often have multi-currency income from several sources. Some have enormous wealth but little income. Wealth is invested, and assets are deliberately diverse. Long gone are the days when your clients kept all their assets and interests in a single jurisdiction. In fact, it’s the exception, not the norm, for high-net-worth individuals to be highly liquid.
But while your high-net-worth clients find themselves needing to access capital regularly, most mainstream lenders cater to borrowers who have straightforward transactions and easy-to-understand personal situations. Lenders like to lend against security that’s local and highly liquid. With global wealth, diverse assets, and complex personal situations, few high-net-worth individuals can deliver the plain vanilla scenarios most mainstream lenders prefer.
So, while there’s no official definition of a complex individual, it’s anyone with a situation or transaction that a lender deems ‘non-standard’.
These days, that’s nearly everyone.
Here’s how Enness approaches financing complex individuals:
Ability To Access The Right Lender
Lenders want to do business, but not every lender can cater to every deal. Most lenders specialise in a specific type of client, certain types of transaction or deals with links (either through the client, their advisors, or the transaction) to certain jurisdictions.
Knowing which lender to approach is vital. If your London-based client is an American citizen who gets paid in dollars and wants a high-value mortgage for a French holiday home, Enness will approach one lender. The bridging loans broker team will approach a different institution to secure seven-figure bridging finance secured against a Parisian apartment for a Swiss citizen resident in Monaco.
Knowing who to approach and having the right connections is the only way to cater to complex individuals.
Delivering What Complex Clients Need
It’s a common misconception that individuals with a complex background are purely motivated by ‘cheap’ finance.
Individuals with complex backgrounds have multiple requirements for finance. Price is always a consideration but rarely is it the only consideration. Some people need to draw down funds quickly. Some want to minimise the hassle associated with a high-value loan. Others don’t want to put assets under management with a new bank. Sometimes flexible terms are an absolute must.
Usually, borrowers want a mixture of all these elements in varying degrees. Enness approaches finance from the perspective of delivering the solution that matches all your client’s needs, rather than only focusing on providing low-price finance at the expense of everything else.
Hand-built Finance
Much of the market delivers inflexible finance packages designed to cater to mass-market needs. The result is complex individuals find financing is a case of forcing a square peg into a round hole. They end up with a workable solution, but one that’s often far from a perfect fit.
Every finance package Enness sources and negotiates for finance is built from scratch to meet your clients’ needs. Finance is also designed with longevity in mind. Working alongside lenders and a client’s advisors, Enness focuses on negotiating finance that suits your client at every stage. Rather than feasible but ill-fitting finance that is cumbersome in the long-term, complex individuals benefit from a completely hand-build package that fits their requirements from the start of negotiations until term.
