As the fallout from the collapse of Carillion hits thousands of suppliers, one Newport finance firm says that they may have a solution to help affected businesses get outstanding invoices paid.

Rogerstone-based United Commercial Finance is a specialist broker in the field of invoice financing.

In essence, they arrange for clients’ invoices to be bought by a third-party finance house in a process known as factoring or invoice discounting.

Director Joe Patrick said: "Whenever you send an invoice out, the finance house will pay you straight away. They then wait for the invoice to be paid before taking a very small commission; usually a matter of pennies in the pound.

"The benefit for you is that you free up your business cash-flow instantly, rather than waiting 30, 60 or even 120 days for the client to pay.

"And not only do you have instant payment for your invoices, you are also protected against the outstanding bad debt,” he said.

With the news of Carillion going into liquidation, Mr Patrick says several construction clients had been spared the agony about their immediate future.

"We knew that we had made an instant positive difference, as they had not only received payment for invoices, and the entire amount is now protected under our bad debt protection scheme,” he said.

Mr Patrick believes that they may be able to help businesses retrospectively, and urges those caught up in the Carillion collapse to get in touch.

"We are actually talking with a few businesses which had nothing but the bleakest outlook last week. Yet where they saw their thriving business about to collapse, their future is looking a little brighter today,” he said.

In the 10 months United Commercial Finance has been established, it has brokered nearly £10m in funding for 78 clients of all sizes and across many industries.