ThinCats partners with Salt Edge to bring Open Banking benefits to SME lending
ThinCats, a UK-based alternative lender to mid-sized SMEs, has partnered with Salt Edge, a leader in offering Open Banking solutions, to improve the efficiency of its upfront credit assessment and ongoing loan monitoring processes.
The UK is globally recognised as a cradle of Open Banking and during these uncertain times the most forward-minded participants in the industry are using data provided by Open Banking to improve their service offerings. According to a recent McKinsey online survey of UK SMEs, 80% of SMEs reported declines in revenues during the Covid crisis. Considering the cash flow challenges that lockdown restrictions have caused, many businesses are struggling to receive additional funding. Using Open Banking data, lending companies can more accurately assess the cash flow needs of creditworthy borrowers and shape funding solutions specific to their needs.
ThinCats is a leading alternative finance provider dedicated to funding growing and ambitious mid-sized SMEs from the UK with loans from £1m up to £15m. The collaboration with Salt Edge will enable ThinCats to build up its Open Banking dataset to support its customers through earlier identification of changing circumstances or additional funding needs. Data aggregation will help ThinCats to integrate real-time information in its credit decisioning and portfolio monitoring
Salt Edge’s data enrichment solution will upgrade ThinCats’ data models with actionable insights.. that will help streamline and shorten the funding process for borrowers.
“Given the high volume of cashflow backed loans that we fund, Open Banking has a key role to play in helping us support creditworthy, but asset-light businesses, so it was important for us to find the right partner. Salt Edge were able to provide a portal-based trial within days, which enabled us to test both the technical aspects of the service and the usefulness of outputs we could expect to see. The support throughout the trial and as we moved to a live API-based solution was excellent; feedback from clients also indicated that the sign-up process from their side was straightforward and user-friendly” said Gareth Rumsey, head of analytics, ThinCats:
“SMEs are in great need of better data-led solutions and we are truly proud to be teaming up with ThinCats, who are combining traditional lending skills with powerful data analytics, and now Open Banking capabilities through our collaboration, to help businesses grow,” said Vasile Valcov, VP at Salt Edge.
