Do You Have to Sign a Personal Guarantee to Trade Your Spare Capacity?

In short

• A personal guarantee exists to secure a debt. Where an exchange lends you spending power before you have earned it, that debt is real, and the operator needs someone to stand behind it.
• Silvatree grants no credit lines, so there is nothing to guarantee. No guarantors, no charges over assets, no credit-reference searches.
• What you can spend is set by an Annual Expense Analysis at your suitability call, not by a credit assessment (Terms Clauses 4.2, 7.2, 7.3(e)).
• BBX's Rules and Bartercard's Trading Rules both tie credit lines to creditworthiness, and both provide for a guarantee or security. Their clauses are quoted below.
• Before signing any guarantee, check who it is owed to, whether it is capped, how long it survives, and whether any of its terms sit behind a hyperlink.

Why would an exchange ask for a personal guarantee?

Because the debt is real, and someone has to carry it.

A credit line is spending power handed over before it has been earned. Bartercard's Trading Rules put it exactly: the Manager may grant a line of credit in Trade Pounds "as an advance on a Member's future sales in an amount and on terms consistent with that Member's creditworthiness and ability to repay" (Rule 22.1). An advance on future sales is a loan of purchasing power. If a member spends it, takes real goods and services from other members, and then stops selling, the shortfall does not evaporate. It lands somewhere.

Asking a director to stand behind that in cash is the ordinary commercial answer. A bank does it. A supplier offering thirty-day terms often does it. An operator that has advanced purchasing power and wants it back is not being unreasonable when it asks who is good for the money.

So the useful question is not whether an operator is unreasonable to ask. It is whether the model you are joining creates the debt in the first place. A credit-line model needs security. A model with no credit lines has nothing to secure. That is a difference in structure, not a concession anyone granted.

One thing to say plainly before the clauses. If someone puts a guarantee in front of you, take your own legal advice on it before you sign. What follows describes what published documents say. It is not advice on whether to sign one.

A note on where this reading comes from

Silvatree's founder, Ian Jones, spent thirteen years running the credit-line model before building its successor. He was Managing Director of Bartercard Tasmania (1993–1998), Managing Director of Bartercard New Zealand (1998–2000), President of Bartercard USA (2000–2002) and Managing Director of Bartercard UK (2002–2006), four countries in all, and he later consulted across the industry, including for BBX New Zealand (2006–2011).

We say so because it is the reason this piece exists. The guarantee is not a detail we found in someone else's small print. It is a mechanism Silvatree's founder used to operate, and one the structure was rebuilt to do without.

What do the published rules actually say?

The table sets out the structural question, then each operator's own words. The BBX column comes from its Rules of the Trading Program (Version 2, October 2021) and its Terms and Conditions (undated, as captured). The Bartercard column comes from the Trading Rules published by Barter Traders UK Ltd, as reviewed in May and June 2026; that document carries no version number or date. The Silvatree column traces to our published Terms and Conditions. Terms change, so read the current documents of any exchange yourself.

One note on that last row. BBX states the duration of its guarantee in the document you sign, which is more than many agreements do, and where a rule-set is silent we have said so rather than filling the gap.

Why does Silvatree have nothing to guarantee?

Silvatree is a Capacity Exchange. A Capacity Exchange is a B2B network where UK SMEs sell spare capacity (unsold time, unfilled rooms, empty seats, surplus stock) for Silva instead of cash, then spend Silva on real business expenses.

The part that removes the guarantee is where Silva comes from. Members issue it to each other at the moment of a transaction. A positive balance means you have supplied more value to other members than you have taken, and a negative balance means the reverse, so the obligation runs between members and the company is "not the lender, the borrower, the obligor, the guarantor or a party to any Member's positive or negative balance" (Clause 5.3(b)). Nobody lent you anything, so nobody needs a guarantor.

What replaces the credit assessment is the Annual Expense Analysis. You sit down at your suitability call and go through the categories of business spending you would genuinely put through the network, setting aside rent, wages, tax and similar fixed obligations. That figure sets your Trading Headroom Limit, the maximum negative Silva balance your account may hold (Clauses 4.2, 7.2). The Terms are explicit that this is not a creditworthiness test: "Trading Headroom is not granted on the basis of, and the Company does not assess, the Member's individual creditworthiness in the regulatory sense" (Clause 7.3(e)).

The limit is a hard floor rather than a warning. The ledger refuses, "automatically and without exception", any transaction that would take your balance below it, enforced at the application layer, the API layer and the ledger layer (Clause 7.4). No interest accrues on a negative balance, and no charge is levied in respect of one beyond the published Cash Fees every member pays (Clause 7.6), which are fixed in the schedule you sign rather than set at anyone's discretion.

If there is no credit line, can you spend before you sell?

Yes, and this is the objection worth taking seriously, because spending ahead of earning is the whole appeal of a credit line.

Your account activates at a zero balance and you can start buying from other members immediately, drawing on your Trading Headroom Limit (Clause 7.2(b)). Functionally, that is spending before you have sold. What changes is the direction of the obligation. You have taken value from members and owe equivalent value back to members, recorded on a ledger, with no lender in the picture and nothing for a director to sign.

Now the limitation, plainly. Headroom is sized to roughly a month's worth of the spending you said you would route through the network, so a new member's starting figure can be smaller than a credit line an operator would grant on a paid tier. Both BBX and Bartercard publish lines that rise with the tier, into tens of thousands of trade units at the top (their accounts and pricing pages, both captured 23 July 2026). If a large opening line is what you are after, that is a real difference, and it is the honest trade for having no guarantee behind it. Headroom then rises on observable trading behaviour, your sales velocity and your buy-to-sell balance over time, rather than on a fee upgrade (Clause 7.3(a)).

One cash obligation is worth reading here rather than finding later. If you leave Silvatree with a negative balance, you settle it in pounds at 1 Silva to £1 within thirty days of the end of your 90-day wind-down period, paid to the company as administrator on behalf of the members in positive positions (Clause 29.2(c)(ii)). It is capped by your Trading Headroom, it is owed to the members you took value from rather than to the company, and no third party has signed for it. Sole traders and partnerships should also read Clause 47.6: your business and you are not separate legal entities, so that obligation is yours in the ordinary way. That is company law rather than a guarantee we asked you for, and it is worth knowing before you join anything.

What should a director check before signing?

Put these to any exchange, this one included. Every question has an answer in a document you can read before you commit.

• Does this create a debt I could be asked to pay in cash? If so, what is the ceiling on it?
• Who is the guarantee owed to, and is that group defined in the document, or left open? Worth reading alongside which entity you are actually contracting with.
• Is it capped at a figure, or does it cover all monies payable?
• How long does it survive after I leave, and what event releases it?
• Are any of its terms incorporated by a hyperlink rather than printed in the document I sign?
• What is charged if my account goes into debit, and at what rate?
• Will a search be run against me or my business, and will my account performance be reported to a credit agency?

An exchange worth joining will answer all seven from its own rulebook without hesitating. If an answer comes back as reassurance rather than a clause reference, ask for the clause.

The difference in one line

A credit line needs a guarantee because a credit line creates a debt. Take the credit line out of the model and the guarantee has nothing left to secure, which is why Silvatree can say no guarantors and no credit checks as a structural fact rather than a favour. Everything above is in published documents, and you can put both rulebooks side by side before you sign either.

If you are weighing more than one network, work through it properly. We have written the questions up as a practical checklist in How to choose a trade or capacity exchange.