Virgin Money partners with Trade Ledger to digitise business lending

Trade Ledger, a Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) platform provider, has won a three-year contract with UK bank Virgin Money.

Virgin Money partners with Trade Ledger to digitise business lending

“At the heart of the partnership is the delivery of a digital decisioning platform,” the lendtech says. The project follows on from the initial tie-up announcement in May last year.

“It goes to the heart of age-old bugbears of business borrowing. The real-time pre-screening tool, which can be completed in minutes, will provide instant eligibility on different Virgin Money Business Finance products, rather than a business having to collate information and spend time filling in forms only to discover they are not eligible,” Trade Ledger explains.

“And by directly accessing accounting data from a variety of software packages and business credit insight from Experian, the typical five-day application process will be reduced to 20 minutes.”

Virgin Money is a full-service digital bank with around 6.5 million customers in the UK.

Graeme Sands, head of business lending and products at Virgin Money, says the vendor’s ability to aggregate application, accounting, and business credit data, will help the bank offer “speed, simplicity and efficiency” to its customers while “continuing to effectively manage risk”.

The project is part of Virgin Money’s commitments to the £35 million award from the Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) Capability and Innovation Fund in 2020.

UK-based Trade Ledger was founded in 2016 and is backed by venture capitalists Point72 Ventures, Foundation Capital and Hambro Perks, and investors such as Court Lorenzini (founder of DocuSign). It has raised £16.6 million to date.

The lendtech says that its flagship offering – the LaaS platform – supports all secured and unsecured business lending products, transforming data sources from the supply chain into actionable insights and tasks.

It claims that, on average, users experience a 60% origination cost reduction, a 50% reduction in dropouts and loan book growth potential of over 100% through embedded finance.

It has a client base of global trade banks, regional and national banks, and alternative finance providers, and is currently scaling globally.