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Debenhams lets Storfund pay its 30,000 marketplace sellers on the day they ship

Debenhams sellers can now draw 80% of shipped sales daily through Storfund. Who owns the product?

Debenhams lets Storfund pay its 30,000 marketplace sellers on the day they ship

Debenhams Group now lets the brands selling on its marketplaces get paid as soon as they ship, instead of waiting for the marketplace's payment cycle. The group has added Daily Advance from London-based Storfund. Eligible sellers can draw up to 80% of their shipped sales every day. Once Debenhams makes its standard marketplace payment, Storfund releases the remaining 20%, minus its fees. There is no subscription, no set-up fee and no minimum term, and it went live on 20 October, ahead of Christmas trading.

Debenhams was a fixture of the British high street for more than two centuries, until it went into administration and closed its department stores. boohoo bought the brand in 2021, relaunched it online as a marketplace and in 2025 renamed the whole group after it. Third-party brands now make up 38.9% of group GMV and the group wants that above 50%.

How Storfund's Daily Advance works

Storfund describes Daily Advance as factoring in the FAQs it publishes on partner marketplaces. Storfund buys what the marketplace already owes the seller for orders that have shipped, pays most of it out straight away and collects the full amount when the marketplace settles.

For that to work, Storfund has to sit in the payout flow. Normally Debenhams pays each seller's balance into the seller's own bank account at the end of its payment cycle, which can take several weeks. With Daily Advance, Debenhams sends that payment to an account Storfund nominates instead. Storfund keeps what it has already advanced plus its fees and passes the remaining 20% on to the seller. So the seller never makes a repayment itself: Storfund is repaid by Debenhams directly.

Is this Debenhams embedded finance?

This is clearly not embedded finance. Daily Advance is Storfund's product, under Storfund's name, with Storfund setting eligibility and taking the fees, and some Debenhams sellers were already using it before the integration. What Debenhams adds is distribution to 30,000 sellers and the redirected payout. Compare that with actual embedded lending products, where the platform owns and controls the product and the lending provider's brand barely shows.

It is still an interesting choice for Debenhams. With most of its growth coming from marketplace sellers, it now has a reason to care about their cash flow, and I assume this could be its first step into embedded lending.

Storfund's model: own brand first, then marketplace partners

Storfund sells Daily Advance to sellers under its own brand and connects to the marketplaces they sell on, more than 60 by its own count, including Amazon and TikTok Shop. It was founded in London in 2018 and started by paying Amazon sellers early. Increasingly it also signs the marketplaces themselves as partners, so the product appears inside their seller tools. In Europe that includes Mirakl Connect in May 2025, Back Market, Kaufland and, in July 2026, Castorama in France. Justin Hanna, who joined Storfund in January after senior roles at Worldpay and Barclaycard, put the Debenhams deal like this: "Liquidity is the next frontier."

Lars Markull

Lars Markull

Founder of Embedded Finance Review. 10+ years in fintech, including employee #1 at figo (open banking) and first Head of Banking at Weavr. Based in Berlin.

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