Royal Bank of Scotland has launched an IP-backed lending product that lets high-growth Scottish companies borrow between £250,000 and £10 million against the value of their intellectual property, in what the bank and legal commentators describe as the first product of its kind in Scotland. The scheme went live on 3 June at the University of Edinburgh and is enabled by the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Act 2023, which has been in operational use since 1 April 2025 and gives lenders a clean route to take effective security over IP rights.
For founders who have spent years being told their IP is valuable while seeing little of that value reflected in their banking options, that combination of law and product is the story. It means a wide range of intellectual property assets — from patents and trademarks to software and licensed rights — can now sit at the centre of a mainstream bank loan in Scotland, not just in an equity deck or a grant application.
IP as collateral, not decoration
RBS is explicit about the gap it is trying to close. The bank says the new loans are aimed at high-growth businesses without significant physical assets, with technology companies, university spinouts, life sciences, health tech, creative industries and gaming — including Dundee’s games cluster — singled out as early candidates. These are firms whose balance sheets are dominated by IP but which have historically struggled to secure bank lending because they lack the property, plant and machinery that fit traditional security models.
Under the Scottish scheme, an applicant’s IP portfolio is identified and valued by Inngot, RBS’s IP finance partner, using its online platform. NatWest’s template in England and Wales allows lending against a proportion of the assessed value, and the Scottish version follows the same core design with the legal mechanics adjusted for Scottish law. The risk profile is still that of secured lending, but IP now counts in the collateral stack instead of being treated as an unbankable intangible.
Martin Brassell, CEO of Inngot, said: “IP has been called the ‘currency of the knowledge economy’ — it’s that important. However, for a currency, it’s not been very liquid in the past. This initiative improves liquidity by enabling businesses to borrow cost-effectively against the value of the intangible assets they own and fund their creation of new ones to boost growth and competitiveness. We’re delighted that recent legal changes now make it possible for Scottish firms to benefit.”
Judith Cruickshank, NatWest Group’s Scotland Board Chair, framed the offer in digital-economy terms: “Our IP-backed loan offering is a key example of how NatWest is supporting Scotland’s digital economy, helping IP-rich firms to accelerate investment and facilitate growth without diluting ownership.” She pointed to companies investing in AI and digital capabilities that do not hold the same tangible assets as traditional businesses.
Law first, then lending
Behind the launch sits a change in Scottish law that most founders will never read but which is fundamental to what is now possible. The Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Act 2023, in force since 1 April 2025, modernised how security can be taken over moveable property, including contractual rights and intellectual property, and created a new form of fixed security — the statutory pledge — perfected by registration in a new online Register of Statutory Pledges.
Before the Act, businesses that held their IP in a Scottish vehicle often found it commercially difficult to use those rights as collateral to raise finance. Legal commentary from firms including Brodies, Marks & Clerk and Addleshaw Goddard has noted that the new regime removes those barriers and aligns Scotland more closely with practice in England, Wales and other markets where IP-backed finance is emerging. The RBS product is the first mainstream expression of that reform in Scotland’s banking market.
Kate Forbes, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, made the connection when RBS first announced its plans: “The Scottish Government brought forward new legislation in 2023 to enable businesses to use their IP to raise finance in the same way as they use physical assets.” She welcomed the bank’s move as a way to support founders to start and scale.
Not a pilot: the England and Wales track record
Although this is a Scottish first, the product is not an experiment built from scratch. NatWest launched its High Growth IP-backed loan in England and Wales in January 2024, again with Inngot as partner, and has already lent more than £22 million through that programme. Examples cited by Inngot include Bristol-based prosthetics firm Open Bionics, which secured a £600,000 loan to expand into the United States, and Liverpool games studio Ripstone, which secured a £600,000 finance package against its IP to support a new games pipeline.
That track record matters for Scottish spinouts and deep tech firms weighing the new offer. It shows that IP-backed lending at this scale can operate as non-dilutive growth capital alongside grant and equity, rather than as a theoretical instrument that never gets used.
Where this lands in the Scottish system
RBS and its partners are clear about the sectors and geographies they expect to see early. Gaming and creative tech in Dundee, AI and software in Edinburgh and Glasgow, life sciences across the central belt, and energy-adjacent digital companies in Aberdeen all fit the profile of IP-rich, asset-light firms that have struggled with traditional collateral tests. NatWest’s Business Growth and Innovation Hotspots index, cited in the Inngot material on the launch, already places Edinburgh and Glasgow in the UK top ten and Aberdeen in the top 25 for mid-market tech and innovation activity.
Seen in isolation, the loan launch is a product story. Seen in the context of Aveni’s £12 million round, Multiverse’s Edinburgh AI skills hub and SNIB’s co-investment into Devilla’s grid-scale storage, it looks more like the fourth piece of a week in which Scotland’s digital-growth finance infrastructure is being assembled in public: venture for AI, human-capital investment, public development capital for infrastructure, and now IP-secured lending from a clearing bank.
The next eighteen to twenty-four months will decide how far this structural change travels. Three questions are worth tracking from here. Who takes these loans first and what they use them for. How quickly university spinouts and tech transfer teams start treating IP-backed bank debt as a standard option rather than an edge case. And whether RBS remains the only Scottish lender in this space or whether a genuine IP-backed lending market starts to emerge across other Scottish-active banks. For now, Scotland’s IP-rich founders have a route to put their core assets on the table with a bank in a way they have not had before.
