Recognition
The refinance itself isn't the hard part
Rate, term and facility size are normally the easy conversation. What actually determines whether a refinance can complete on the timeline anyone wants is the state of the existing security: how many charges are registered, what each agreement says about consent, and whether anyone's actually read the documents rather than just checked the register.
Why it happens
Growth adds lenders one at a time. Refinancing has to deal with all of them at once
Each charge usually made sense on its own: a debenture for the first facility, a second lender brought in for equipment, a third for working capital once the business had outgrown the original arrangement. Nobody was managing the structure as a whole at any point, because each decision was made in isolation. A refinance is the first moment something forces all of that to be looked at together.
What actually has to happen
Four stages, in this order
- Establish exactly what's registered. Pull the real charges from Companies House, not from memory, since a charge nobody remembers agreeing to is more common than it should be. See Company Charges Explained for how to read what's actually there.
- Check every existing agreement for a negative pledge. If one exists, that lender's written consent is a precondition of the refinance, not paperwork to sort out afterwards. The charge particulars at Companies House flag whether each charge restricts further security (Companies Act 2006, section 859D), but the agreement itself is what sets the actual terms.
- Decide what happens to each existing charge. Full repayment and release, staying in place at an agreed rank, or being replaced by the new facility's own security: three different outcomes needing three different sets of paperwork.
- Document the resulting ranking properly. An intercreditor agreement (or a simple deed of priority for a two-lender case) if more than one charge-holder is staying in place once the refinance completes.
Where this tends to go wrong: a business assumes a new lender's due diligence will simply surface any problem with the existing structure in time to fix it. In practice, an existing lender that hasn't been approached early enough can hold up completion for weeks once its consent turns out to be required, or refuse it outright if it feels ambushed rather than consulted. Approaching every existing charge-holder before terms are agreed with the new one, not after, is what actually keeps the timeline intact.
Where this fits
Before any facility choice, not instead of it
This sits above the individual facility pages on this site: whatever the new facility ends up being (a credit line, asset-based lending, a term loan), the structural work above has to happen first if more than one existing lender is involved. See Bespoke & Larger Facilities if the refinance itself is also unusually large or combines more than one product type.
Decision helper
Alternatives and limitations
When this isn't the right starting point
If the honest answer is that the existing structure is fine and it's really the facility size or type that no longer fits, the individual product pages on this site cover that directly. This page is specifically for the added complexity of more than one existing secured lender, not a general refinancing explainer.
