Major SME lender ScotPac has inked a deal with fintech Trade Ledger in a new partnership that could see turnaround times for commercial brokers slashed.
According to the non-bank, they will be able to use Trade Ledger’s platform to help their brokers submit documents, track applications and receive approvals more quickly than ever before.
“This is a really critical partnership for ScotPac,” said Jon Sutton, CEO at ScotPac. “We’ve formed a partnership with Trade Ledger which is an award-winning Open Baking fintech. They were named among the UK’s top 40 fintechs.”
“It’s a service platform that supports secured and unsecured business lending products, and it’s led by Martin McCann, who has over thirty years of cash flow lending experience.”
“What is does is allow us to digitise what has largely been a fairly onerous paper, spreadsheet, moving bits of paper process between brokers, introducers, debt advisors and ScotPac.”
“What we are doing now is streamlining and digitising so that we can upload documents really quickly and we can give prompt approvals – in fact, we’ll shortly be releasing to the market a product in asset finance where we will be able to give almost instantaneous approvals.”
“For commercial brokers, the first thing that they want to do is to be able to give a positive answer to their customers. It’s really evident that what we see in the banking market for SMEs is that the banks take an enormous amount of time to make decisions about lending and around asset finance.”
“What this will do for brokers is enable them to see first hand where their commercial deals are in the queue and they’ll be able to see approvals with much faster turnaround times, particularly on simple transactions.”
“In this day and age, particularly for the customer, the broker wants to be able to secure a yes quickly, so that the customer has surety of finance and can move on with their business.”
“ScotPac make the claim to be the biggest non-bank in the SME space, and Sutton was confident that this new partnership will enable them to do deals like fintechs can, but at their volumes.”
“We had a customer that came to us who had quite complex needs, and we were able to provide them with the invoice finance approval overnight, and they got their money within 24 hours.,” he said.
“What we are able to do is add more lending type products to this digitisation process, and provide increasingly more bespoke financial solutions to those SMEs. It might be a combination of debtor finance and asset finance.”
“We will certainly be able to provide much faster turnaround times on asset finance, getting that down to a matter of minutes.”
“Even for more complex deals, where there is a lot of back and forth between broker, lender and customer, we will be able to streamline it. We’ll be able to update accounting information, KYC, onboarding and all the things that take time much more efficiently, as it’s all built into the system.
