Why direct funding beats using a broker every time

If you’ve been supplying equipment to schools for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered lease brokers who promise to help schools afford your equipment by arranging finance. 

On the surface, this sounds like a helpful service that bridges the gap between schools’ limited budgets and their technology needs. But when you dig beneath that appealing proposition, you’ll find that brokers are middlemen who add complexity, cost, and delays to what should be a straightforward transaction.

At Utility Rentals and Classroom as a Service (ClaaS), we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach. We’re a direct funder, which means we make our own lending decisions and use our own capital to finance school equipment. There are middlemen taking their cut, and no unnecessary complications slowing things down.

The broker problem 

To appreciate why direct funding makes such a difference, you first need to understand what actually happens when you work with a broker. The process begins when you submit your quote to help a school acquire your equipment. The broker then takes that quote and begins shopping it around to multiple third-party lenders, hoping to find someone willing to finance the deal. Each of these lenders has different criteria, different rates, and different appetites for risk, so the broker is essentially playing matchmaker and hoping for a successful pairing. For this service, they charge handsomely.

This model creates a cascade of problems that affect your ability to close deals efficiently. Your carefully crafted proposal sits in limbo while the broker waits for responses from potential funders. Days stretch into weeks as the broker juggles multiple conversations with different lenders. Meanwhile, the school’s initial enthusiasm for your products begins to wane as they wonder why such a simple transaction has become so complicated. In some cases, your competitor swoops in with a simpler offer and wins the business simply because they could move faster.

Even after all that waiting, there’s no guarantee the deal will actually be funded. If the lenders decline, you’re back to square one – except now the school is frustrated and you’ve wasted valuable time. Then there are the hidden costs that erode value for everyone except the broker. Their commission gets built into the lease rate that schools ultimately pay, which means higher payments for them and smaller deal sizes for you. 

Perhaps most frustratingly, brokers add very little actual value to offset all these complications. They’re simply acting as an intermediary in a transaction that doesn’t actually require intermediation. The real work of assessing credit, structuring the lease, and funding the purchase still gets done by the eventual funder. The broker just sits in the middle, creating extra steps and collecting fees.

Broker vs direct funder: the essentials

Arguably the most important distinction between direct funding and broker-arranged finance is philosophical. As a direct funder, our only goal is to get more of your products into schools. This alignment of interests means we’re constantly looking for ways to make the process easier, faster, and more affordable for everyone involved.

Brokers, by contrast, succeed by inserting themselves between parties and collecting fees for being the intermediary. Their business model depends on maintaining their position in the middle of transactions, which creates an inherent incentive to keep the process at least complicated enough that suppliers and schools feel they need the broker’s services.

This difference manifests in practical ways. We’ve invested in developing our proprietary quoting tool precisely because we want to make it as easy as possible for you to transform your quotes into subscription proposals. The tool takes about 30 seconds to use and generates a co-branded proposal with a built-in response form making it easy for the school to say yes.

The benefits of our direct funding

We’ve eliminated the middleman entirely by becoming the funder ourselves. We’re part of The Longriver Group, which has 40 years of experience and substantial capital in the leasing sector. This heritage means we have both the expertise to structure compliant leases and the financial resources to fund them directly. 

The main benefits of working with us to provide direct lease funding are:

Instant decisions

We’re an approved provider on the Everything ICT framework, which means we have pre-approved all UK state schools and academies for our finance. They don’t need to go through tedious credit checks or funding applications, all while worrying they might be rejected. The school simply signs a straightforward one-page agreement, and we’re ready to proceed. For you as a supplier, this means your proposals can move from initial interest to signed contract in a fraction of the time it would take with a broker-arranged deal.

Market-leading rates

The second transformative benefit is that we can offer market-leading rates that make your equipment more affordable for schools. When you remove broker commission from the equation, everyone benefits except the broker. We don’t need to inflate our lease rates to cover a middleman’s fees, which means schools receive more competitive pricing. This improved affordability translates directly into larger deal sizes for you as a supplier. We regularly see schools able to equip every single classroom with the technology they need, rather than making do with partial solutions, simply because our subscription model is more affordable without broker fees eating into their budget.

Guaranteed (prompt) payment

The third major advantage is payment certainty. We guarantee payment within 72 hours of project completion. This guaranteed payment timeline is possible because we are the funder. We’re not waiting on anyone else to release money or approve paperwork. Compare that to working through a broker, where you might wait weeks or even months for your payment to clear.

Making the switch to direct funding

If you’re serious about growing your sales to schools, you need to remove the obstacles that prevent deals from closing. Working with brokers adds time delays, cost through commission, communication complexity, and uncertainty. Working with a direct funder removes these obstacles and replaces them with faster decisions, better rates, guaranteed payment, simpler communication, and ongoing partnership opportunities.

When you look at the practical implications, the advantages of direct funding become clear. You get paid within 72 hours rather than waiting weeks or months. Your deals close faster because schools don’t need to wait for broker approval or third-party funding decisions. Your deal sizes are larger because schools can afford more equipment when they’re not subsidising broker commissions. And you have ongoing opportunities to supply upgraded equipment when lease terms end.

Ready to experience the difference? Try our proprietary quoting tool to see how quickly it transforms your quotes into subscription proposals: Quoting Tool, or get in touch to discuss how we can support you in selling more equipment to schools.

Tags

• Leasing school equipment