The average Start Up Loan is £10,264, according to the government-backed scheme that lends founders up to £25,000 each. On 10 September the programme, part of the British Business Bank, reported 3,215 loans between June and August 2026, up from 2,849 a year earlier, and a record £40m of summer lending.
That average describes what people borrowed, not what a particular business needs. A drop-shipping shop that never holds stock, a website paid commission on Amazon sales, a freelance web designer and an online casino each need money at a different moment, so the useful question is where the first money comes from and who checks it before it arrives.
A lender’s adviser reads the business plan. Payment companies decide which trades they will process, and platforms and clients decide when they pay. HMRC sets conditions on shares that carry tax relief, while a casino answers to one more reader of its accounts, the Gambling Commission.
A state-backed loan, and the businesses it turns away
A Start Up Loan is an unsecured personal loan for business use, at a fixed 7.5% a year over one to five years, with no arrangement or early repayment fees and 12 months of free mentoring. Applicants must be 18 or over, UK residents with the right to work here, and running a UK business that is new or has traded for up to 60 months.
They must also be unable to raise finance elsewhere, which the scheme accepts on self-declaration. The lender checks the applicant’s credit with a credit reference agency, and fraud prevention agencies validate their personal information and bank account details. A dedicated business adviser reviews the plan, and the lender judges viability from that plan and a cash flow forecast, and affordability from a personal survival budget.
Partners can each borrow up to £25,000 where there is a business need, up to £100,000 for one business, and each is personally liable for their own loan.
The eligibility page also lists business types the scheme does not fund. Among them are “gambling and betting activities”, an entry that rules out the casino, and “agents for third parties, where a third party earns the majority of the revenue or you would only be earning a commission”.
A site that earns only commission on Amazon sales appears to fall within that wording, so an affiliate founder should check with the scheme before applying. A drop shipper keeps the margin between its price and its supplier’s, and a designer bills for its own work, so the agents entry does not obviously cover either, although the page warns that other exclusions may apply.
A casino’s payment partners need to handle withdrawals too
Taking payments is the next hurdle, and it is a high one for a casino. Stripe’s UK list of prohibited businesses names “games of chance including gambling, internet gambling, casino games”, and Stripe calls the list representative rather than exhaustive. PayPal’s UK acceptable use policy makes casino games subject to its approval, and only where the operator and all of its customers are in jurisdictions that permit such activities by law.
In Great Britain, that legal footing is a Commission operating licence, required of anyone providing gambling facilities to players in England, Wales and Scotland, so a new casino’s payment talks turn on the licence it holds or is seeking.
Approval to take deposits covers only half of what a casino needs from a payment partner, because its customers will also take money out. UK players who compare the best payout casino options on gambling.com are told that a withdrawal usually returns to a method they deposited with. If that method cannot accept a payout, a player may have to agree another with the casino, and anyone who used several deposit methods can see one withdrawal split between them.
For the operator, this means nearly every deposit method it accepts is one it should expect to pay out through, and one split withdrawal can need two different payment partners to complete. A partner willing to collect a casino’s deposits but not to carry its withdrawals would leave customers arranging alternatives one at a time, so the agreement a new casino signs has to cover payouts as well as deposits.
The first takings arrive on someone else’s calendar
The other three businesses face a different problem: they wait for money they have already earned. Shopify Payments settles UK sales after at least three business days, and its help page counts a Friday sale as day 0, so with a three-day settlement the payout processes on the Wednesday. A bank can then take another one to three days to show the money.
The same page lists what can stretch that wait. Shopify can hold payouts while it reviews an account over disputes, complaints or compliance checks, keep part of a merchant’s funds in reserve against disputes or refunds, and move accounts it deems higher risk to a schedule of 5 to 20 business days. A drop shipper that pays its supplier as each sale comes in carries that gap itself.
Amazon makes a new affiliate wait twice. A site that applies to Amazon Associates has 180 days to refer a sale, and once it has referred three qualifying sales, Amazon says it will evaluate the application “within a day or two”. Without enough qualifying sales in that time the application can be withdrawn, and Amazon says it cannot reinstate a rejected account.
After approval, commission is earned once an item has shipped, and Amazon pays it monthly, about 60 days after the month ends, provided the balance meets the minimum threshold and tax information is on file. In Amazon’s own example, “Payment for January is made in late March”.
A freelance designer waits on clients instead. In a November 2024 survey of 1,063 UK small businesses, QuickBooks found that 62% were owed money from unpaid invoices, about £21,400 each on average, and that 54% had at least some invoices more than 30 days overdue. Setting out payment terms at the start, as an earlier article here on strengthening cash flow for remote B2B teams advises, can shorten that wait without removing it.
Selling shares instead of borrowing
A founder who would rather sell part of a company than borrow meets HMRC next. Its guidance on how a company can use the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, known as SEIS, caps what a company can raise this way at £250,000, a total that counts any other de minimis state aid received in the previous three years.
The company must be established in the UK, with gross assets of no more than £350,000 and fewer than 25 full-time equivalent employees when the shares are issued. Any trade it already runs must be no more than three years old, the money must be spent within three years, and investors pay for the shares in full, in cash, on issue.
The relief belongs to the investors. HMRC’s guidance for them sets SEIS income tax relief at 50% on up to £200,000 a year, and directors can claim it, but not where an investor and their associates hold more than 30% of the company’s shares, assets or voting rights. The relief therefore reaches backers and directors with smaller stakes, not a founder who owns most of the company.
HMRC’s formal check comes after the shares are issued, although a company can ask beforehand whether the share issue is likely to qualify, a step known as advance assurance. The company can send its SEIS1 compliance statement once the new trade has run for four months or 70% of the money is spent, and HMRC reviews it before issuing the SEIS2 that lets the company give investors their SEIS3 certificates.
The investment must also carry a risk, in HMRC’s words, “that the investor will lose more capital than they are likely to gain as a net return”, and investors’ relief can be withheld or withdrawn if the company does not follow the rules for at least three years.
None of this helps a sole trader, who has no shares to sell, so a drop shipper or designer trading alone would need to incorporate first.
A casino licence starts with six months of bank statements
The operating licence application, open only to applicants who are 18 or over, is the most searching check a casino’s money faces. The Commission’s checklist asks for six months of bank statements for all accounts, profit and loss projections for the next three years and proof of funding.
Its guide to the documents makes allowances for newer and smaller businesses. A new business with no bank accounts yet that belongs to a larger group sends the statements of the company that owns it. An operator meeting the Small Scale Operator definition sends a brief business plan setting out “how the business is being funded”, with a 12-month forecast instead of three years.
Loan agreements go in too, although a loan to the operator from a UK regulated bank normally needs no evidence of where the money originated. An investor who borrows from such a bank to invest is treated differently: the guide says the regulator will normally check the period when the money was in that investor’s control.
Private money has thresholds of its own. Any individual providing £50,000 or more must give evidence of its source, and the guide’s examples are “bank statements, investment portfolio statements and P60s”. A company that is not regulated must give evidence for any amount if it was incorporated less than 12 months before investing, or for £1,000,000 or more if it is older.
Anyone holding 10% or more of the equity counts as a financial controller and completes a personal declaration form. The guide adds that each application is assessed case by case according to risk, so the evidence asked for may differ between applicants.
Once licensed, a casino may serve only adults, and the Commission confirms that the legal minimum for online gambling is 18. Help is free, day and night, for anyone whose gambling is causing harm: GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline advisers take calls and WhatsApp messages from England and Scotland on 0808 8020 133. For Wales, the Commission points people to an NHS line, 0808 2819 265.
HMRC’s guidance for investors says advance assurance “should not be read as a general endorsement by HMRC or an indication of potential investment performance”. A loan offer, a payment partner’s approval and a Commission licence call for the same caution. They record a founder passing one organisation’s test at one moment, and none of them brings in a customer.