Ensuring businesses have access to appropriate finance is key to an enterprising region. Entrepreneurs need finance to start new businesses and existing businesses need it to realise opportunities for growth.
Accordingly, Advantage West Midlands has drawn together a Regional Finance Forum and Access to Finance Framework with the aim of ensuring that innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth are not adversely affected due to a viable business being unable to access appropriate finance.
Advantage West Midlands' role in enabling access to finance involves identifying market failure and gaps in the supply of finance and working with the private sector to explore the most appropriate ways for these to be filled.
This has led to the provision of a range of grants, loans and venture capital that provide businesses with funding, as follows;
Equity based finance via:
Business Angel networks
Other sources of equity
Loans
Grants
with the exception of Grants for Reseach and Development and Selective Finance for Investment Grants these are all externally managed.
Investment Readiness
In addition, via the West Midlands Business Link, we support initiatives that increase businesses' awareness of different types of finance and what finance providers expect of businesses, effectively helping make them 'investment ready'. Further information can be obtained by contacting the Business Link on 0845 113 1234 or by following this link to Business Link.
The most comprehensive source of information about all types of finance for business in the West Midlands is via the finance portal: www.westmidlandsfinance.com This contains more than 500 different sources of public and private sector funding, including a number of funds supported by Advantage West Midlands.