Open Up 2017

Bud is an award-winning banking platform. We aggregate financial services so small businesses and consumers can manage their finances in a single place – their bank account. We provide banks with the software that enables them to integrate third-party services and apps – such as investments, pensions, utilities etc – into their bank accounts, creating a financial hub for their customers.

Businesses who work with an adviser are 4x more likely to receive funding than those without a trusted adviser. By providing tools into the accounting ecosystem, Capitalise.com helps UK businesses avoid a trap of being left with limited, last minute choices, by changing their behaviour to move to a more considered search into our network of over 100 institutional lenders to find their match.

Our focus has been understanding the behaviour between businesses and their advisers to diversify lending to the great options beyond the 4 banks who command 90% of the SME lending market.

Coconut is a current account for freelancers and self-employed people which manages your tax, tracks your expenses and helps you get paid on time. We’re launching our Beta for sole traders in January and you will be able to open an account within a few minutes from your phone. We’ve been using Open Banking to experiment with things like maximising tax savings for our customers.

Credit Data Research is the market leader in credit behavioural analysis, it is active in 5 European countries accessing 80% of the European SMEs segment. The company is innovating the credit scoring space for SMEs through its Basel compliant Credit Passport® platform, leveraging credit behavioural data through Open Banking, increasing transparency and competition. Credit Passport® accelerates the capital flowing in the SME segment, facilitating the dialogue between small businesses and potential lenders.

Fluidly is an intelligent cashflow engine – our technology plugs into accounting packages and bank accounts to predict and optimise business finances. We help SMEs get paid faster with intelligent credit control, automate cashflow forecasting and spot financial opportunities. Backed in September 2017 with a £2M seed round led by Octopus Ventures, we combine human, financial and artificial intelligence to deliver control, certainty and confidence around cashflow.

Fractal is an automated financial assistant, helping SMEs manage cash and capital requirements. Fractal uses machine intelligence to predict and surface financial outcomes, and empowers business managers to easily connect with their banks and advisors in simple, natural language. Open banking provides access to transactional data which forms the foundational layer for financial analysis. Our mission is to increase liquidity throughout the value chain by removing friction in the SME financing market. The Fractal team is made up of technical and financial engineers, data scientists and designers from organizations such as Google, Morgan Stanley and the United Nations.

Conrad Ford founded Funding Options in 2012 to give SMEs the same levels of ease and speed that consumers take for granted when comparing financial services products. Funding Options is now the UK’s leading online marketplace for business finance, each year raising one hundred million pounds in vital SME finance from more than fifty different lenders.

Handle the small business dashboard which now supercharges your business bank account. Handle enables SMEs to supercharge their bank account, so they can manage cash position, grow top line sales, compare and save money on their key expenses and always be finance ready by taking control of their credit score.

Europe’s second largest alternative lender, offers small businesses fast, flexible and fair access to finance to meet their needs. Our award-winning, technology-driven credit facility is specifically designed to approve and deliver funding within hours, using a straight-forward online application process. Since 2012, iwoca has helped thousands of the UK’s small businesses with loans totalling more than £250 million.

Teller is the safest way to connect your bank accounts with the next generation of financial apps, letting you choose the level of access you feel comfortable with. Teller provides the highest quality banking APIs available today. Create a developer account and begin playing with real production APIs for 11 high street banks in less than 5 minutes.

Despite the UK-led fintech boom, banking hasn’t changed all that much for most UK small businesses since 1970. Most core business banking services in the UK – current accounts, loans, and other financial services – are still provided by just a handful of large banking groups. 80% of UK small businesses hold a current account with one of five major banks.

Open banking is a technology infrastructure that enables services provided by different parties to work together to deliver better banking services for customers. In the UK, it will mean rules agreed across the major banks that define how a third party can access and use a customer’s banking data, or access that customer’s account to initiate payments.

Open banking removes huge barriers for third parties looking to engage with and provide services to a bank’s existing customers. It will also enable small businesses to compare banking services from different providers based on their own characteristics. Teams received extensive user-experience support helping them integrate user-centred thinking into their infrastructure, so innovations worked for SMEs from the outset.