TruNarrative and B-North agree partnership

Manchester-based SME lender B-North has announced a partnership with Leeds-based RegTech platform TruNarrative to provide onboarding and compliance technology

TruNarrative’s platform capabilities will be added to B-North’s selected technology stack providers, which already includes core banking from Mambu and loan originations workflow from nCino (the first time that both providers have integrated their solutions together for business lending).

Founded in 2018, B-North is led by a team of former senior leaders from Atom Bank, Metrobank, First Direct and Santander. They aim to challenge the current SME lending landscape, offering mid-to-high value loans with the face-to-face experience of a traditional bank and the speed and efficiency of a modern FinTech lender.

B-North will grant loans of between £500k and £5million and is architected to deliver secured loans to SMEs in as little as 10 days, delivering capital to businesses up to 10x faster than incumbent banks and lenders.

The partnership follows a competitive tender process and will give B-North full access to the TruNarrative solution and its capabilities, for customer onboarding, identity verification, account monitoring, payment screening, transactional risk and ongoing risk monitoring of customers.

B-North has raised over £7m in seed capital to date, most recently surpassing its crowd fundraising goal of £2m at the turn of the year. It is currently fundraising again to raise capital which will underpin its bank licence and support its lending activities during mobilisation, due to begin in the second half of 2020.

Edward Vaughan Head of Banking at TruNarrative said “TruNarrative has been working with B-North since early 2019 and I am delighted that they will be becoming one of our newest customers. B-North are true innovators in the SME lending space and are backed by an exceptional and highly experienced team.”

Jonathan Thompson CEO at B-North said “B-North unlocks real benefits for businesses by harnessing the best technologies and combining them with our unique regional approach. TruNarrative is a key partner for us in building our tech-focused bank and will be instrumental in helping us deliver fast, informed lending decisions whilst ensuring the highest levels of compliance and a smooth customer experience. We aim to facilitate SME lending with market-leading technology and lead times, and to give our customers the best of the traditional and the modern.”