Born out of one of the world’s biggest manufacturers, GE Capital should understand asset-based lending. John Jenkins, chief executive of GE Capital, explains to Will Stirling how asset-based finance helped their manufacturing customers through the recession as the value of core assets held up when finance linked to other, cash-flow or covenant-based terms crashed.
When credit was cheap, asset-based lending (ABL) was shunned for a time by certain cohorts of manufacturers, keen to avoid betting the farm when the cost of borrowing might become unaffordable. But some financiers say that ABL has always worked, if the needs of the business are correctly matched to the facility. John Jenkins runs GE Capital UK, which lends about £10bn to UK SMEs annually and is a corporate finance player with a strong track record in lending to manufacturers, especially the automotive sector.
