4 ingenious FinTech companies in the UK lending ecosystem

By Megha Bhattacharya

The UK Lending FinTech ecosystem is brimming with disruptive companies. FinTech lenders employ the latest technologies to streamline the traditionally out-of-date and non-transparent lending process. FinTech has allowed lenders to power and accelerate their payment processing time and offer personalized experiences based on each loan and mortgage seeker’s needs.

Check out the 4 FinTech lenders that have constantly been innovating and boosting their market presence in the UK-

• OakNorth

OakNorth Bank is a UK bank for small and medium-sized companies that provides business and property loans. The Bank has approved over £2 billion in new loans since March last year, including several hundred million via CBILS and CLBILS.

The bank, which gained regulatory approval in early 2015, was founded by entrepreneurs Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman, who had previously founded Copal Amba. OakNorth’s 2020 results, published in March, revealed a pre-tax profit of £78 million.

OakNorth Bank aims to provide flexible and accessible debt finance (from £500k to £50m) to fast-growth businesses and established property developers/investors. It has debt finance teams in London, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, and East Anglia.

• Iwoca

iwoca is an online FinTech company based in London. It offers credit facilities to small businesses trading in the UK and Germany via an automated lending platform. Iwoca recently secured funding via the government’s Future Fund scheme, a funding program that aims to offer high growth firms an opportunity to match third party investments of up to £5 million by subscribing for convertible loans issued by such firms.

The FinTech lender announced a UK-first integration with small business platform Xero. iwoca’s invoice checkout – iwocaPay will be integrated into Xero’s platform for enabling small businesses to provide a Pay Later option to their business customers. The collaboration will allow iwocaPay to be directly accessible in Xero.

Founded in 2011 by Christoph Rieche, CEO and James Dear, CTO, iwoca provides loans of up to £250,000 to small and micro businesses via its website and through its lending API and Open Banking, using digital solutions to slash the time and paperwork required to approve funds.

• B-North

UK-based B-North aims to deliver an outstanding borrowing experience for SME businesses and intends to offer competitive savings products to UK retail consumers and business customers.

The SME lending bank recently selected Wiserfunding as its risk grading partner to speed up credit profile assessments of SMEs and support B-North underwriters to make better lending decisions. B-North utilises Wiserfunding’s prediction solution alongside traditional human underwriting methods.

The Manchester-based lender partnered with the RegTech platform TruNarrative to facilitate enhanced customer onboarding, compliance capabilities, and faster business lending. The integration follows B-North’s partnership with Mambu for core banking solutions and with nCino for loan origination workflow.

• Funding Xchange

Funding Xchange is an SME lending marketplace and intelligent decisioning platform that serves over 10,000 customers a month. Founded in 2014, Funding Xchange aims to bring transparency and efficiency to small business lending. It refers small businesses declined credit by their bank to other sources of funding.

FinTech Funding Xchange and Capco recently announced that they aim to encourage the financial services industry to recognise the importance of FinTech lenders to small businesses as the government-supported Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS) comes to an end.

The company focuses on bringing about efficiency in SME lending distribution by holding lenders’ underwriting models and integrating with their decisions. Funding Xchange mirrors lenders’ decisions based on their credit policies, affordability models, and risk pricing.