Confidential invoice discounting

CID is the most common form of invoice finance among mid-sized UK B2B businesses. The lender advances typically 80 to 90 per cent of the value of approved invoices, the business continues to chase its own customers, and once the customer pays into the dedicated trust account the lender takes its drawn balance and discount fee and remits the rest. Customers never see the lender, which is why it is called confidential.

To qualify for CID, lenders typically want a clean ledger, robust internal credit-control processes and a minimum turnover of around £500,000 to £1 million depending on the provider. Smaller or less mature businesses are usually steered towards disclosed factoring instead, where the lender takes on credit control directly. CID is also normally offered on a whole-turnover basis, meaning every eligible invoice goes through the facility.

Confidentiality matters when the customer relationship is sensitive — for example, when a large customer might react badly to seeing a third-party lender on its remittance instructions. The trade-off is that the business retains the full burden of chasing slow payers, which is one of the reasons CID has a lower service fee than disclosed factoring.