OakNorth has announced the acquisition of Intelligent Cashflow business, Fluidly. Founded by entrepreneurs, Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman, OakNorth’s mission is to empower the ‘Missing Middle’ – scale-up businesses that are the most significant contributors of economic and employment growth, yet still struggle to access the fast, flexible debt finance they need to grow.
It is addressing this funding gap with its software, the ON Credit Intelligence Suite, which leverages data-driven, real-time sector insights, and ML-powered anomaly detection, peer comparisons, sector insights and events-based scenarios, to enable banks to lend faster, smarter and more to businesses. The software is being deployed by leading banks such as: SMBC, ABN Amro, Capital One, PNC, Fifth Third, and OakNorth’s own bank in the UK, OakNorth Bank – which the Fluidly team will work closely with.
Founded in 2016, Fluidly’s mission is to help small businesses sleep better at night via its cashflow forecasting tool. This mission is highly synergistic with OakNorth’s mission to empower the ‘Missing Middle’ through its use of data and forward-looking analytics. Since its launch in September 2015, OakNorth Bank has lent over £6.5B, supporting some of the fastest growing and most successful businesses across the UK. This has directly helped with the creation of 23,700 new jobs and 20,300 new homes. The Bank’s impressive growth to date has been largely fuelled by its highly satisfied customer base, which in turn, has led to high levels of referrals and repeat business.
To continue creating this exceptional experience for customers as it scales, OakNorth will continue investing in its digital offering, providing the speed and insights to customers which have become key differentiators in its proposition, and created the flywheel that has propelled its growth to date. The team which Fluidly has assembled, as well as its relationships with c.1,300 accountancy firms, will help propel this growth strategy, and mean that OakNorth can support an even greater number of small and medium-sized UK businesses.
Rishi Khosla, Co-founder and Group CEO of OakNorth, commented: “This is an exciting moment for us, we have always said that we will be opportunistic in evaluating acquisitions that have a strong strategic fit with our mission. We have found that with Fluidly and look forward to welcoming the Fluidly team. We continue to be open to evaluating acquisitions which help us further our mission to empower the Missing Middle.”
Caroline Plumb, founder and CEO of Fluidly, continued: “Fluidly and OakNorth are natural partners, and we’re strongly aligned in our mission to support SMEs. We’re very excited to be joining the team and start the next stage on our journey to help more businesses.”
