10x Banking and ezbob partner to accelerate SME lending for banks
10x Banking, the 4th-generation core banking platform powering some of the world’s largest financial institutions including Westpac and Chase UK, today announces a partnership with ezbob, a lending technology company who has worked with the likes of NatWest and Metro Bank. The partnership brings together ezbob’s lending-orchestration platform with 10x’s modular core and ledger to enable banks to launch SME lending products in weeks rather than months, and with less risk.
SMEs are the backbone of the UK economy, accounting for 99.9% of all private businesses, yet SME lending remains one of the most persistent digital experience gaps in UK financial services. Incumbent banks have fully digitalised and automated simpler retail journeys such as current account onboarding and smaller personal loans, but SME lending is materially more complex. Attempts to close that gap have stalled because systems built on workflow tools or legacy cores move a process through internal steps without creating a connected customer journey, and become costly to operate.
The new partnership sees ezbob provide the end-to-end lending solution, orchestrating onboarding, application, credit decisioning and AI agents. 10x provides the modular core and ledger capabilities needed to define and operate the lending product and maintain an accurate financial system of record. Open integration allows specialist components to be connected without forcing a bank into a single closed suite, and shared components can be reused to add further lending products rather than building a new silo each time. Overall, this will give banks the ability to launch new SME lending products in weeks rather than months, significantly reducing go-to-market and time-to-value.
ezbob brings substantial experience in the segment. Lending products built on its platform have gone live in as little as six weeks, enabling 90%+ of applicants to complete an application in under five minutes and automating 94% of approvals. This, combined with the reusability of existing components and an AI-first deployment methodology, has enabled banks and financial institutions to further reduce time-to-market when launching subsequent products on the platform.
The partnership starts in the UK, and in SME lending, where there is a wide digital experience gap. The companies intend this as the first step in a global partnership, extending to further markets and lending lines over time.
Okan Ozaltin, chief product & technology officer, 10x Banking, said: “Banks are too often asked to choose between a broad suite that is difficult to adapt and a collection of point solutions that never quite connect. Neither gets a lender to market quickly. Bringing our core and ledger together with a specialist origination platform gives them a faster, lower-risk route to market, and the flexibility to keep evolving itafterwards. SME lending is where customers can get the most value, which is why we are starting there.”
Yaron Shoshani, chief technology officer, ezbob, said: “We built ezbob to digitise the lending journey itself, rather than automate an internal process on top of systems that were never designed for it. Pairing that with a tier-one bank-grade core means a lender can launch a complete SME product, automate decisions where policy allows, and reuse the same components to add further lending products instead of building a new silo each time.”