Lemon, a SaaS finance gateway tailored to supporting SaaS vendors with reducing subscription costs for their SMB customers, is officially launching its lending product to the wider market following a successful Beta stage. This product enables SaaS companies to be paid up-front for their annual or multi-year subscriptions to their SaaS services, whilst their SMB customers maintain achievable monthly repayments at a cheaper rate than these annual contracts bring. By partnering with Shawbrook, Lemon will benefit from the bank’s significant financial resources and specialist lending capabilities, creating exponential opportunities for rapid scaling. 

Traditionally, fintech lenders need to raise significant amounts of debt onto their balance sheet, which is both difficult to achieve and comes with a much higher cost for the end user. Lemon is now fully focused on developing the product to service as many SaaS vendors as possible, whilst also ensuring the most affordable cost is passed on to SMBs. In recent use cases, Lemon has saved businesses over 50% of the expenditure on SaaS subscriptions, and reduced churn for vendors.

Speaking on the partnership, Philipa Pykett, Head of Digital SME Growth at Shawbrook Bank, said: “We’re delighted to be supporting Lemon with its ‘first-of-its-kind’ SaaS financing product. As a specialist lender, we’re able to offer small and medium-sized businesses the type of tailored products and premium service that much larger corporate organisations can expect. So, Lemon’s mission of providing these same small businesses with the purchasing power of much larger organisations – benefitting from lower prices and better terms – is something we recognise and are happy to support. We’re excited to be the first financial institution collaborating on this innovation and we look forward to seeing this partnership grow and more businesses benefit.”

Matt Bird, CEO and Co-Founder of Lemon, said: “Collaborating with Shawbrook is testament to the market demand for a SaaS financing solution that helps both the buyer and seller win, but also adds value to the banking ecosystem, and we’re proud to be integrating Shawbrook’s lending products into Lemon’s current offering. 

“The finance element will vastly increase the capabilities of our existing product, allowing us to onboard and service a huge variety of SaaS vendors who need to reduce their current customer churn, and at the same time, reduce costs for their customers. The knock-on effect of this could be extraordinary, and we can’t wait to see our visions and ideas for better SaaS financing solutions become a reality through this collaboration.”