Funding Xchange completes £8m funding round

It says it will use funding to expand its services to banks and alternative lenders.

Funding Xchange has completed an £8m funding round, saying the funds will help speed up the delivery of its "next generation" platforms.

The funding round was led by Downing Ventures and Gresham House Ventures.

Funding Xchange, founded in 2014, provides technology for companies such as Moneysupermarket and Experian. The business was set up by Katrin Herrling, whose family owned a dairy farm in Ireland.

It said it will use the funding to expand its services to banks and alternative lenders.

Herrling said: “We are delighted that Downing and Gresham House have joined us on our exciting journey to help reshape a sector that is rapidly adopting digital solutions using new data sources to enable the delivery of seamless, instant access to finance.”

“This is creating the opportunity to provide small businesses with the same transparency and ease of access to finance that consumers have become accustomed to."

"The funding round will enable us to accelerate the delivery of the next generation of our data and decisioning platform that enables banks and lenders to instantly transform their customer proposition by digitising their customer interfaces and decisioning to deliver personalised and transparent access to their own lending products or refer customers to selected third party lenders.”

Daniel Cheung, Investment Executive, Downing Ventures said: “Funding Xchange is delivering digital solutions that respond to some of the biggest challenges that banks and SME lenders face as the market is undergoing unprecedented change – driven by new lenders and solutions changing the market dynamics, availability of new data and increasing regulatory scrutiny.”

“We were impressed by the advocacy Katrin and her team have built for their data-driven approach. Partners like MoneySuperMarket can instantly give small businesses transparency of funding solutions and ensure that customers are always treated fairly.”

“The next phase of Funding Xchange’s growth is now seeing lenders leverage Funding Xchange’s digital technology to provide their customers with instant, personalised quotes while reducing their own costs to serve customers by 70%."

"As a technology and data analytics business, Funding Xchange’s market insights are already helping banks and lenders build and test funding propositions that respond to customer needs and address the funding gap. This is game changing in a market that has been notoriously opaque.”

Funding Xchange says its technology helps businesses access personalised funding quotes in the less than four minutes and receive funds within 10 minutes.

It is part of the Treasury's Bank Referral Scheme, which connects small businesses that were rejected for a traditional banks loan to alternative lenders.