During 2016, the SBCI announced three new on-lender partnerships with Bibby Financial Services Ireland, First Citizen Agri Finance and Fexco Asset Finance. This brings the total number of SBCI on-lenders to eight, providing Irish SMEs with more choice and an enhanced range of SBCI funded products.

• First Citizen Agri Finance became SBCI’s third non-bank on-lender in May 2016. First Citizen Agri Finance offers hire purchase and leasing facilities to the agriculture sector.
• Bibby Financial Services Ireland became an SBCI on-lender in June 2016. This partnership represented a new product offering for the SBCI. Bibby offers SMEs invoice financing products. Invoice finance is a working capital facility which releases cash tied up in outstanding customer invoices (debtor/sales ledger) and improves cash flow availability for businesses.
• Fexco Asset Finance became the fifth non-bank on-lender to partner with the SBCI in November 2016. Fexco Asset Finance has a strong presence in Munster, and offers specialist leasing finance to SMEs across Ireland.

The SBCI committed a further €155 million of funds in 2016 to its three new on-lenders, bringing the total figure of committed funds since inception to €906 million. Engagement with potential new on-lenders is ongoing and the SBCI expects to announce additional on-lender partners in 2017 as it strives to further increase the availability of funding to SMEs.

By year end 2016, the SBCI had supported 12,593 SMEs and 67,150 jobs with €544 million of funding. It had supplied €457million of investment loans to SMEs, €60 million of working capital loans and €27million for refinancing of loans from banks exiting the Irish market. The average interest rate on all SBCI loans to December 2016 was 4.6%.

There was a broad regional spread of loans ranging from 18% in the South-West to 6% in the Midlands. As was the case in 2015, agriculture continues to be the largest sector supported by the SBCI with 23% of total loans attributed to that sector as of end December 2016. This was followed closely by the wholesale and retail sector with 18% and the accommodation and food sector representing 14% of the total SBCI loans.