Flip Finance’s David Floyd and Dan Gregory were commissioned by RBS to write a report highlighting the significant level of existing investment in the social sector by mainstream banks and questioning whether the ‘social investment market’ is filling major gaps.

David explains the new insights they uncovered in his post – Nearest Cash Points – on his blog:

The report explains that RBS has around £250 million in lending outstanding to the social sector and, if replicated across all banks, this would amount to total lending of over £3 billion. There’s also a huge level of overdraft finance available to social enterprises and charities from mainstream banks: nearly £100 million from RBS alone, £1.2 billion is replicated across all banks.

These are big numbers and it’s big news, not least because it’s the first time (to our knowledge) that a bank has provided this kind of information on its lending to the sector. While the past six years have seen rapid scaling in the rhetoric and survey-based branches of the social investment report industry, generation of meaningful data has been stuck firmly in the start-up phase.

Much of the new data in our report was generated by matching a database of nearly 200,000 social organisations (charities, CICs, CLGs and Community Benefit Societies) with RBS’s customer database. Around 16,000 (8%) of those organisations were active RBS customers and our report provides information about lending to and saving by those customers.

 

→ You can download an interactive pdf of the report here.