How commercial finance works.

Commercial finance operates outside the disclosure requirements that govern consumer lending. There is no mandated comparison rate on a business loan, no statutory Best Interest Duty obliging a commercial broker to act in your interests by law, and no standard format for showing what a loan actually costs over the period you will hold it. The default is opacity — and the cost of opacity on a commercial deal is real.

These guides cover the fundamentals a business owner needs before placing a significant deal: how the Australian lending market is organised, what each lender category is built to fund, how brokers earn and where their incentives sit, and how to calculate the true cost of a loan rather than anchor on the headline rate.

The writing is based on more than a decade of placing commercial deals across all six lender categories. It reflects what the market actually does — where banks draw their credit templates, what happens to a deal when it steps outside those templates, and which numbers on a term sheet you should be reading before the rate. The guides assume you are commercially literate, not that you know the market.