The small and mid-sized enterprise (SME) finance platform Crowdz selects GoCardless‘ open banking payment features to bolster its payment and risk modelling capabilities
The online payment processing solution is to integrate its open banking technology with Crowdz’s platform to enhance the platform’s ability to drive equitable access to finance for small businesses.
The company has confirmed the incorporation of three of GoCardless’ payment features, namely:
- Instant Bank Pay in the UK, USA and Europe to collect one-off payments directly from a bank account, offering more payment options for both funders and sellers.
- Verified Mandates in the UK, USA and Europe for fraud protection, providing more certainty and increasing confidence in the process.
- GoCardless’ PayTo integration in Australia for payments and account verification.
Crowdz’s selection of these services follows its $10million investment round earlier this year, which was led by Citi and Global Cleantech Capital. To date, the company has provided $80million in working capital to SMEs.
Speaking on the sourcing of GoCardless’s services, Crowdz CEO and co-founder, Payson E. Johnston, explains that “With our global expansion plans and our target of providing 25,000 SMEs with over $1billion in working capital by the end of 2023, we needed a partner that could offer the right coverage, technology and expertise.”
“That’s where GoCardless comes in,” he adds.
The platform targets its alternative financing solution at SMEs that have previously struggled to access capital via banks and lenders.
Its risk assessment model, ‘the SuRF score’, enables more equitable financing than a traditional credit score through data while deploying blockchain technology for transparent transactions.
To date, Crowdz has closed various deals, including a tech deal with a Meta (formerly Facebook) SME financing programme, which has already provided minority-owned SMEs with more than $70million in capital.
Discussing the platform’s adoption of its open banking features, Duncan Barrigan, chief product officer and chief growth officer at GoCardless, says the integration will enable the platform to “accelerate their speed-to-market and offer cutting-edge payment solutions, making it that much easier for SMEs to gain access to working capital all over the world.”
Crowdz represents the latest open banking customer to sign with GoCardless following the fintech’s entry into the space with the launch of its first open banking-powered feature, Instant Bank Pay, back in 2021.
This year GoCardless raised its Series G funding round to accelerate its open banking strategy and announced the acquisition of Nordigen, the freemium open banking data provider, to combine broad open banking connectivity with bank payment expertise.
Last month the company also introduced verified mandates — which leverage AIS technology to prevent fraud — in France.
