Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
Credit information provider, CRIF has announced that it has partnered with invoice financing provider Penny to utilise open banking to enable invoice payments.
The new service utilises CRIF’s Credit Passport®, which uses open banking data to provide a real-time, secure way of speeding up the decisioning process for lenders and providing transparency and advice for SMEs on their creditworthiness.
Penny customers will be able to connect their business bank accounts, allowing an instant soft credit assessment via open banking. This approach gives a fuller, more accurate picture of a business’s finances than traditional types of credit scoring and reduces fraudulent applications by establishing a historical relationship with the invoice subject.
With data refreshed daily, businesses that may have previously been rejected due to a lack of credit information can now get their invoices paid instantly, with the decision process cut to less than 30 seconds and funds released within 24 hours. Utilising open banking in invoice financing in this way enables a clearer, more accurate picture of a business’s creditworthiness and allow for more informed, lower-risk lending decisions to be made.
Sara Costantini, Regional Director for the UK & Ireland at CRIF, said “The UK’s small businesses are the backbone of the economy, but many have struggled during the challenging economic climate in recent years. Compounding this is the fact that some businesses are denied access to financial support when lenders are unable to build a clear, accurate picture of their finances – particularly if they haven’t been trading long.”
“At CRIF, we want to solve that problem. That’s why we’ve partnered with Penny to bring the power of open banking to invoice financing, so more small businesses can get their invoices paid instantly, helping with cashflow while improving future creditworthiness”
Colin Gunnell, CEO of Penny, said “For over 15 years, the UK’s 5.5 million SMEs have been systemically underserved by lenders and denied the finance products available to their corporate counterparts”.
“There is a huge portion of the SME market that is not able to access business finance products due to the inability of conventional funders to make real time decisions. Penny and CRIF have both individually identified this as a universal problem in the UK which needs to be resolved, building sophisticated platforms to breach the funding disadvantage experienced by SMEs.”