Simply Asset Finance's loan book hits £532m; Kara credited for workflow growth

Simply Asset Finance, a UK non-bank lender to small and medium-sized businesses, reported a gross loan book of £532m at 31 December 2025 and said its Kara AI agent had helped drive growth across payments, customer communications and lending proposals. The company also said an automated payout journey built on Kara could get money to selected vendor partners in under eight minutes.

That figure needs unpacking before it means much to a UK business owner or broker. The eight-minute journey, announced on 12 February 2026, initially applied to vendor partners who already held an approved line of credit and were drawing against it to fund a purchase. The disclosures reviewed for this article do not establish whether eligibility has since widened beyond that initial group. It is a claim about how fast Simply could pay out once a credit decision had already been made, not a claim that any new SME borrower can be assessed and funded from scratch in eight minutes.

That distinction matters because the difference between automating an already-approved drawdown and automating the underwriting decision itself goes to the heart of responsible business lending: who decided the customer could borrow, on what evidence, and who is accountable if that decision turns out to be wrong.

What Kara actually does

Simply unveiled Kara in July 2025. By December 2025 the company described it as an agent that draws on the firm's historical data to improve the customer experience, streamline internal processes and expedite lending decisions. In its August 2026 full-year results, Simply said Kara is used across payment processing, customer communications and the handling of lending proposals, and that it had enabled year-on-year growth of 30% to 40% across those three activities.

Simply has not published the underlying volumes, a breakdown by workflow, the measurement period or any independent verification of that growth figure. It is the company's own characterisation of Kara's contribution, not an externally audited measure, and readers should treat it as such.

Public disclosures also do not say which of Kara's outputs are generated autonomously, which are recommendations passed to a human underwriter, and which are simply automated checks that a process has been completed correctly. Simply has not published a workflow diagram or a decision-rights matrix setting out where the agent's role ends and a person's begins.

Eight minutes after approval, not eight minutes to a decision

For the under-eight-minute journey, Simply said the automated process sources and analyses data across sales, underwriting and payout touchpoints, and checks that the required decisions and compliance checks have already been completed. That description is consistent with an automated verification and disbursement layer sitting on top of an existing, previously approved credit facility, rather than a system conducting a fresh underwriting assessment for a new borrower.

Simply also said early evidence suggested the automated journey could cut payout times by as much as 85%. It did not disclose a sample size, the baseline duration the comparison was measured against, a success or completion rate, or any independent validation of the figure. As with the growth claim, this should be read as an early company proof point rather than an established result.

It is not clear from public material how long it typically takes to establish or renew the underlying approved credit line in the first place, or what share of Simply's total payouts currently run through the fast-track journey rather than the conventional process.

Growth claims under scrutiny

Simply also said its cumulative customer base passed 13,000 and total agreements passed 23,000 during 2025, 23% higher than the year before. Pre-tax profit fell sharply year on year even as revenue grew, and the packet does not establish how much of that fall relates to technology investment, staffing costs, funding costs or credit losses.

Two figures in Simply's own disclosures do not reconcile cleanly. The company reported a £543m gross loan book on 11 December 2025, three weeks before its 31 December year-end figure of £532m; the earlier release did not state an exact balance-sheet date, so the gap may reflect timing, repayments or portfolio movements, but it has not been explained. Separately, a company newsletter reported 23,600 agreements at the halfway point of 2025, while the full-year results describe total agreements as "more than 23,000" for the year as a whole — an apparent reversal that may reflect different definitions of active versus cumulative agreements. A newsletter figure of £65m for FY2024 revenue also sits alongside the company's own reported £60.4m for the same period in its June 2025 results release, which is the figure consistent with the stated 9% growth to £66m in FY2025. None of these discrepancies has been resolved in the material reviewed for this article.

Humans in the loop: support, not disclosed oversight

Simply said on-demand support from lending experts was available for the initial rollout of the automated payout journey and presented Kara as a tool intended to support the firm's personal, expert-led approach rather than replace it. The company also reported a 45% increase in front-office headcount during 2025 and a total workforce of 196, which is evidence that the Kara rollout coincided with staff growth rather than any disclosed reduction in human roles.

Availability of support is not the same as disclosed oversight of every automated decision. Simply has not published escalation thresholds, override rights, exception rates or the proportion of automated journeys that are reviewed or interrupted by a person. Nor has it named a senior manager accountable for Kara's operation, its errors, or its performance over time.

Where UK regulation applies, and where it doesn't

Not all of Simply's lending sits inside the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) regulatory perimeter. The FCA has said that much lending to limited companies, business lending above £25,000, and parts of alternative lending fall outside its remit, while lending of £25,000 or less to sole traders and small partnerships generally falls within the consumer-credit perimeter. Simply Asset Finance Operations Limited (FCA firm reference number 798195) and SAF1 Limited (FCA firm reference number 799893) are both named on the company's own website, but the packet does not establish what proportion of the £532m loan book, by balance or customer count, is regulated consumer credit as opposed to unregulated business-to-business lending.

On artificial intelligence specifically, the FCA does not currently propose AI-specific financial-services rules. It relies on its existing outcomes-based frameworks and has said that senior-management accountability remains relevant to the safe use of AI in regulated firms, whichever specific rules apply to a given product or customer.

Separately, since 5 February 2026 the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 has allowed significant solely automated decisions using personal information in a wider range of circumstances than before, provided safeguards are met: the person affected must be given information about the decision, an opportunity to make representations, a route to human intervention, and the ability to contest the outcome. Restrictions remain for special-category data. These safeguards concern natural persons, so they may be relevant where a Kara-assisted decision uses personal data about a sole trader, partner, director or guarantor — but the packet does not establish how, or whether, they apply to each specific Kara workflow.

What Simply still needs to disclose

A fuller picture of Kara would require Simply to publish, among other things, the underlying volumes behind its growth claims, a completion-time distribution for the eight-minute journey rather than a single headline figure, its exception and override rates, the identity and accountability of the senior manager responsible for the system, and a clear statement of what proportion of its loan book is regulated versus unregulated business lending. None of that has been made public in the sources reviewed for this article. Simply Asset Finance Operations Limited filed its full accounts for the year ended 31 December 2025 at Companies House (company number 10588244) on 13 August 2026; those accounts were not reviewed in detail for this article beyond the filing-history record.

What to watch next

Readers with an interest in how Simply's automated lending journey develops should watch for whether Simply extends the eight-minute payout beyond the vendor partners covered in its initial rollout to a wider pool of borrowers, whether the company discloses measurable outcomes such as arrears or complaint rates for Kara-assisted lending, and how the FCA's separate work on AI in financial services develops as automated tools become more common in SME lending. The FCA's review of small businesses' access to finance, published on 17 September 2026, addresses the regulatory perimeter for SME lending; it is a distinct piece of work from the FCA's general approach to AI, and the packet does not establish that it covers automated decision-making. Anyone borrowing against a Simply facility should be aware that business lending can fall outside FCA regulation and that consumer protections such as the Financial Ombudsman Service may not apply in every case. The FCA Register can confirm whether a firm is authorised, but it does not by itself establish whether a specific lending agreement is regulated — that depends on the contracting entity, the customer type and the product involved, and should be checked against the agreement itself and official FCA or GOV.UK guidance, rather than inferred from the register or from marketing material.