Ahead of authorisation from the FCA and PRA, B-North is set to procure TruNarrative’s RegTech SaaS services, enabling delivery of B-North’s compliance and customer onboarding strategy.
B-North, the Manchester-based firm building an SME lending bank for the UK, has chosen Leeds based RegTech innovator, TruNarrative, to provide a full suite of customer onboarding and compliance capabilities that will enable B-North to deliver crucial business lending up to 10x faster than large incumbents.
TruNarrative’s platform capabilities will be added to B-North’s selected technology stack providers, which already includes core banking from Mambu and loan originations workflow from nCino (the first time that both providers have integrated their solutions together for business lending).
Founded in 2018, B-North is led by a team of former senior leaders from Atom Bank, Metrobank, First Direct and Santander. They aim to challenge the current SME lending landscape, offering mid-to-high value loans with the face-to-face experience of a traditional bank and the speed and efficiency of a modern FinTech lender.
B-North will grant loans of between £500k and £5million and is architected to deliver secured loans to SMEs in as little as 10 days, delivering capital to businesses up to 10x faster than incumbent banks and lenders.
TruNarrative’s technology will enable B-North to rapidly and compliantly deliver their lending products to market. Their technology is trusted around the globe across a range of industries, including banking, lending, eCommerce and payment services.
The TruNarrative platform will deliver customer onboarding, robust compliance and financial crime prevention, delivering a single risk view through the implementation of strong ID & biometric verification, risk assessments, business credit insights, multi-bureau eKYC, PEPs, Sanctions and Adverse Media.
With a requirement to make rapid, high-value lending decisions central to their overall proposition, BNorth went to market for a solution or solutions to facilitate low-friction customer journeys whilst maintaining the highest levels of compliance and risk mitigation.
The partnership follows a competitive tender process and will give B-North full access to the TruNarrative solution and its capabilities, for customer onboarding, identity verification, account monitoring, payment screening, transactional risk and ongoing risk monitoring of customers.
The TruNarrative solution will integrate with B-North’s core banking platform and front-end systems to deliver a seamless experience for B-North employees, direct customers, commercial finance brokers and intermediaries.
TruNarrative will deliver checks and ongoing monitoring against corporate entities, their directors and associated third parties, giving B-North a single customer view when making compliance decisions.
Within the TruNarrative interface, B-North will also have access to a full case management system for manual review and referrals, a natural language rule builder allowing for rapid strategy changes, and a comprehensive audit trail for instant recall of all data for regulatory purposes.
Rather than building onboarding and monitoring systems from a range of point solutions or using legacy systems, B-North’s partnership with TruNarrative provides them a quick route-to-live mode, whilst managing the client risk process and driving agility and speed-in-decisioning within a single platform.
B-North has raised over £7m in seed capital to date, most recently surpassing its crowd fundraising goal of £2m at the turn of the year. It is currently fundraising again to raise capital which will underpin its bank licence and support its lending activities during mobilisation, due to begin in the second half of 2020.
Tapping into a UK SME lending market valued at over £150 billion per year, B-North will operate regional ‘Lending Pods’ of underwriters, valuers and expert lending bankers across the UK – the first of which will launch in Manchester – to build face-to-face relationships with growing businesses and deploy capital efficiently.
“TruNarrative has been working with B-North since early 2019 and I am delighted that they will be becoming one of our newest customers. B-North are true innovators in the SME lending space and are backed by an exceptional and highly experienced team.” Edward Vaughan – Head of Banking, TruNarrative
“B-North unlocks real benefits for businesses by harnessing the best technologies and combining them with our unique regional approach. TruNarrative is a key partner for us in building our tech-focused bank and will be instrumental in helping us deliver fast, informed lending decisions whilst ensuring the highest levels of compliance and a smooth customer experience. We aim to facilitate SME lending with market-leading technology and lead times, and to give our customers the best of the traditional and the modern.” Jonathan Thompson – CEO, B-North.
