Funding A Business Turnaround 3: Understanding Bank Security Calculations

Where a lender has concerns about a business and their security position they will often instruct an independent business review from an insolvency practitioner, or very occasionally, one of the turnaround firms.

Bank security is concerned with the simple questions:

• can the lender currently get out or not? and

• how does your plan affect this ability going forwards?

Essentially a lender's security will be the assets over which they have taken a fixed or floating charge with which to secure their loans to the business, together with any supporting security held such as a personal guarantee from a director or shareholder. Normally a bank will hold a debenture from a company for its borrowings giving:

· a fixed charge over property, and sometimes over major items of plant and machinery, under which the company is unable to sell the specified items without the lender's consent and under which the lender receives payment first from the proceeds of sale if they are ever realised; and

· a floating charge over everything else in the business, including its receivables, which will then crystallise to catch the value of everything that the company owns at the moment of any insolvency, under which the lender will get paid out after certain other claims are met.

A full estimate of a lender's security position will be a complex matter, requiring specialist assistance in the valuation of assets and assessing reservation of title clauses.

For the purposes of most businesses however, simply looking at the position comparing the realistic realisable value of the property, and the likely realistic recovery that might be expected from debtors in an insolvency, should provide a reasonable broad brush view of the lender's position. If your business has a significant value of fixed plant and machinery over which the bank has security, you will need to add lines in for this as well.

This can then allow you to understand how confident or exposed the lender will feel about your business. By rolling this calculation forward based on your forecast balance sheet you can also see how the lender's security position is likely to be affected by further trading. By discovering whether you are asking them to become more exposed or if your action will help them to improve their position, you can help to ensure their support.

This assumes however that all finance is through a single lender, such as a bank and of course these days you may not have a simple single bank funding position. For many companies the debtors may be funded separately, by a factor or invoice discounter, while another lender may be providing a mortgage on the property and a third finances the plant and machinery. In these cases each funder will have to look at their own particular position.

In any event, whatever your security position, obtaining increases in funding from your bankers to deal with a cash crisis may be difficult so in the next article we will start to look at the steps you take to manage a real cash crisis.