Helping Your Business Clients Align Their Lending with Your Strategic Advice

Lydian’s Commercial Lending Review for referring accountants and financial planners

Your strategic advice helps clients make important decisions about their business, wealth and future. The lending arrangements behind those decisions need to support the same objectives.

For business owners, those arrangements often develop over many years. Property loans, working capital facilities, equipment finance, shareholder funding and personal guarantees accumulate as needs arise. As the business grows, the combined structure can become difficult to assess and may create constraints that affect your advice.

Lydian Corporate Advisory’s Commercial Lending Review provides a structured assessment of that position. Through our Corporate Debt & Capital Review, we work alongside you to understand the client’s funding requirements, identify lending risks and develop a practical capital strategy that supports the advice you provide.

How the review supports your client relationship

As the referring partner, you bring an understanding of the client’s circumstances and strategic priorities. We contribute specialist analysis of debt, banking arrangements, borrowing capacity and security.

Our review examines six connected areas: structure, pricing, liquidity, security, capacity and stakeholder credit strength. It establishes where the client stands today, what could be improved and what capital they may need next.

This gives you and your client a clearer basis for decisions about growth, acquisitions, property, succession and personal financial planning. It also helps identify funding issues early, before a facility renewal or business opportunity creates pressure to act.

Working alongside accountants

For accountants, the review connects financial performance and business planning with the practical requirements of lenders.

We work with you to understand historical results, management accounts, forecasts, cash flow and planned expenditure. We then assess whether the existing lending structure supports the business’s operating cycle and future objectives.

A profitable, growing business may still face cash flow pressure if working capital facilities have not kept pace with revenue. Similarly, loan repayments or lending conditions may limit the flexibility needed to fund an acquisition or invest in equipment.

Our role is to identify those constraints and assess suitable funding options. Your accounting and tax advice remains central to decisions involving ownership structures, distributions and related-party funding, including whether shareholder loans should remain in place or be considered for repayment or restructuring.

The outcome is a lending strategy informed by the financial picture you have helped the client establish.

Working alongside financial planners

For financial planners, the review provides visibility over the connections between business debt and personal wealth.

Directors and shareholders may have personal guarantees, residential property security, investment loans and capital committed to the business. These exposures can be relevant to the client’s retirement, liquidity and succession objectives.

We help map those connections so you can consider them within your broader advice. We distinguish between the business’s capacity to service debt, the additional financial strength its owners bring and the assets actually pledged to lenders.

Where appropriate, we assess opportunities to negotiate security arrangements or reduce reliance on personal assets, subject to lender requirements and approval. We also consider how business commitments interact with the client’s personal lending needs.

This gives you a clearer understanding of the lending position when advising on the client’s long-term financial goals.

Bringing business risk and personal lending into the same conversation

A commercial lending decision can affect more than the business balance sheet.

A family home may secure business facilities. A personal guarantee may continue after the original reason for it has changed. Several loans may share security, making an asset sale or refinancing more complicated. Loan expiries may also create pressure at an inconvenient point in the client’s business or personal plans.

Our review makes these arrangements visible and identifies which matters warrant further assessment. Where appropriate, we test funding resilience against lower revenue, tighter margins, slower debtor collections or higher borrowing costs.

For you as the referring partner, this provides useful information to support conversations about risk, liquidity and the timing of strategic decisions.

Our Corporate Advisory Review Advice Process

We follow a structured process that keeps the client’s objectives and your advice connected throughout the engagement.

1. Discover: We establish the client’s business and personal objectives, existing banking relationships and expected capital requirements over the next 12–36 months. Your insight helps frame the priorities.
   
2. Analyse: We gather financial information, facility details, security arrangements and relevant director and shareholder information. We consolidate these into a debt and facilities register and map the relationships between borrowers, assets, guarantees and lenders.
   
3. Review: We assess debt structure, total borrowing costs, liquidity, lending conditions, business credit capacity and stakeholder financial strength. We consider how these findings affect the strategy you and the client are developing.
   
4. Recommend: We deliver a Corporate Debt & Capital Report with a prioritised action plan. Recommendations may include retaining suitable facilities, negotiating terms, restructuring debt, reviewing security or preparing future funding capacity.
   
5. Implement: Under an agreed mandate, we prepare the lender presentation, engage appropriate lenders, compare options and negotiate terms. We coordinate with you and other relevant advisers through documentation and settlement.
   
6. Monitor: We establish an annual review discipline to keep lending arrangements aligned with business performance, capital needs and changing personal circumstances.

When a referral may be valuable

A review may be particularly useful when your client is planning growth, considering an acquisition, approaching a loan renewal, managing working capital pressure or preparing for succession.

It can also be valuable when personal assets support business debt, shareholder funding is significant, or the client’s banking arrangements have become difficult to understand.

The review does not need to lead to a change of lender. It may confirm that existing facilities remain appropriate, identify improvements with the current bank or establish a plan for future funding.

A coordinated service that supports your advice

Our role is to translate the client’s strategic objectives into a practical lending and capital plan. Working with you, we help the client understand their options, assess the trade-offs and implement agreed funding decisions.

For referring partners, that means access to a lending specialist who can contribute to the broader advice relationship and help address the financing questions behind your recommendations.

If you have a client whose lending arrangements may no longer support their business or personal objectives, we welcome a discussion about how Lydian’s Corporate Debt & Capital Review can support your advice.

Lydian Corporate Advisory – Corporate Debt & Capital Review Document 1.pdf 

Lydian Corporate Advisory – Corporate Debt & Capital Review Example 1.pdf 

Funding outcomes, pricing and security changes depend on individual circumstances, verification, lender requirements and credit approval. Personal financial and credit information is assessed with appropriate consent.