Paragon’s commercial lending division wrote £93.4m in asset finance and £36m in motor finance for its first quarter results up to 31 December 2018.
Its asset finance figure was a year-on-year increase of 55%, while its motor finance was a 25% growth year-on-year.
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Its commercial division doubled new lending in the past year with every product line showing growth, said the bank.
The volume includes £19m from Iceberg, which joined Paragon in December 2017. Like-for-like asset finance growth was 27%.
In total Paragon Banking Group reported a 41% increase across all business lines to deliver £661m of new lending in the first quarter of 2019. Commercial lending reported the highest levels of growth across the Group, to achieve a 105% increase in lending to £212m, compared to £103m in the same quarter last year.
Development finance reported a 451% year-on-year increase in lending with £79m of new business written in the quarter. That was in line with the £321m of new advances achieved by the combined Paragon and property finance company Titlestone teams in the year to September 2018.
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By GlobalDataStructured lending brought in over £3m of business in the quarter.
Richard Doe, managing director for commercial lending at Paragon, said: “These results show further progress and strong growth for the commercial lending division and our recent acquisitions of Titlestone and Iceberg are only helping to grow our business to new levels across asset finance and development finance.
“As a specialist lender, Paragon is working hard to improve access to funding for British companies and SMEs and our increased levels of lending reflect this.”
The trading update also reported that mortgage lending grew by 22% to £449m, with buy-to-let advances up 24% to £425m. In the results Paragon also declared savings balances exceeding £5.6bn at the quarter end.
Paragon Bank has expanded its asset finance proposition to fund soft assets along with its existing support for traditional hard assets. Finance will be provided for soft assets, which include a broad range from IT and office equipment to medical equipment and commercial fitouts or refurbishments.
