Monthly trend

Monthly trend

Monthly trend

Source

UK Companies House: the live charges API (/company/{number}/charges) for per-company detail, and the free monthly bulk company data product for the complete active-company candidate list. Both are official Companies House data, not a third party's estimate. The bulk snapshot has a capture date (see Admin → Pipeline); the live API detail is refreshed continuously as the scans run.

What we have done to the raw Companies House data

• Identified the relevant company universe, rather than repeatedly processing millions of companies with no charge history
• Retrieved and structured individual charge records from the live Companies House API, not just a static snapshot
• Extracted charge holders (the persons_entitled on each filing, including more than one where a charge lists several)
• Identified and classified lenders by name, with a canonical layer for safe filing-noise duplicates
• Classified likely product type: invoice finance, asset finance, commercial mortgage, bank lending, and more
• Identified invoice-finance relationships specifically, including relationships a simple name-pattern match originally missed
• Grouped multiple filings against the same company and lender into a single relationship, without losing the underlying filing count
• Calculated relationship and charge age from the real registration date, not the day we happened to check it
• Retained the original Companies House filing status (outstanding or satisfied) rather than inferring a current relationship
• Built lender activity over time, month by month
• Preserved the underlying source data throughout, so nothing is silently discarded

Known fact, derived, and modelled

Invoice-finance identification methodology

A charge is flagged as invoice finance in one of two ways. First, a direct pattern match against a curated list of known IF lender names, applied at scan time. Second, "reclassified": a charge whose holder was not on that original pattern list, but has since been confirmed as an Invoice Finance product type by the separate name-classification pass. Reclassified rows exist in the raw charges data from the start, they were simply not visible as IF until classified. Both routes are shown side by side via the "Source" column on the Companies tab.

Refresh frequency and status definitions

This tool rebuilds from current scan data on a periodic schedule, not a strict fixed interval. See the "Data last refreshed" line at the top of every tab for the real last-build time. Outstanding and Satisfied are Companies House's own filed charge statuses, passed through unmodified, see Limitations below for what that does and does not prove.

Coverage: what is and is not included

Included: every active UK company Companies House's bulk product flags with at least one registered mortgage/charge, plus companies in non-active statuses (liquidation, administration, proposal to strike off, receivership, voluntary arrangement) that carry a charge, via a separate recovery scan. Not included: companies that have been fully dissolved and struck off the register. They are absent from the free bulk product itself (verified: zero "Dissolved" status rows with any charge count in the file), so recovering them would need a different Companies House data source, not yet attempted. Three scan tracks run independently and do not overlap by construction (each checks a shared "already scanned" ledger before processing a company), so combined totals are a clean sum, not an estimate.

Definitions

Lender classification and normalisation

Every distinct charge-holder name is a candidate for classification into one product-type category (invoice finance, asset finance, commercial mortgage, and so on, see the Lender directory tab for the full taxonomy). Classification confidence is recorded per lender and is not uniform: high-volume names have generally had more research attention than the long tail. …

Name normalisation is deliberately conservative. A safe automatic merge only collapses names that differ solely by a known filing-noise qualifier (for example a trailing "as Security Agent" or "Company Number" suffix), or by whitespace and punctuation. Names that share a base name but differ by legal-entity suffix or a substantive word (for example "HSBC Bank PLC" vs "HSBC UK Bank PLC", genuinely different ring-fenced legal entities in UK banking) are NOT auto-merged. They sit in a review queue (…) pending manual confirmation, because collapsing them incorrectly would distort lender rankings at real scale. See Admin → Lender classification to work through the review queue.

Known limitations

• Satisfaction (MR04) filing is discretionary and often never made. Satisfied-versus-outstanding is a signal, not proof of a current or former relationship.
• Modern Companies House filings carry no facility pound value, so lender rankings here reflect a share of identified records or relationships, not lending value.
• Where a charge lists more than one persons_entitled (for example a syndicated facility with a security trustee), all names are now captured going forward. Historical records captured before this fix retain only the first name; a full backfill would require re-fetching those companies from the API, not yet done.
• Dissolved/struck-off companies are not covered (see Coverage above).
• Unclassified lender names remain a large share of the total (see the count below), concentrated in the long tail. Classification is prioritised by occurrence count, not alphabetically.
• Company size band (Micro/Small/Medium+) was only ever looked up for companies the original SIC-targeted scan matched, so bulk-scan and reclassified rows are frequently "Unknown size" rather than genuinely unusual businesses.