Funding Xchange closes £8 million funding led by Downing Ventures and Gresham House Ventures

November 17th London, UK: Funding Xchange (FXE), the FinTech that has built digital decisioning technology to enable partners like MoneySuperMarket, Monzo and Experian to offer their customers instant access to personalised transparent quotes for business funding, today announced the closing of an £8 million funding round, led by Downing Ventures and Gresham House Ventures.

Funding Xchange has created the world’s first intelligent decisioning platform that transforms efficiency in SME lending by holding lenders’ underwriting models.  Through its mediation platform, businesses can access personalised funding quotes in less than four minutes and receive funds within 10 minutes – rather than days or weeks as is usually the case.  The company has also integrated access to finance into payment solutions and cloud accounting software to offer a seamless experience for small businesses.

The new round of investment will enable Funding Xchange to harness the technology behind its marketplace service to accelerate the rollout of its white label ‘lending in a box solution’, which digitises key steps in the underwriting process so that banks and lenders can instantly and cost effectively serve business customers, while also ensuring the best products from across the market are easily available to their customers.  

The company is led by co-founder and CEO Katrin Herrling, one of FinTech’s most respected female entrepreneurs. Katrin set up Funding Xchange after seven years with Bain & Co.’s Financial Services practice where Katrin worked with UK and European banks to build viable lending propositions that address the gap in SME lending.

Funding Xchange’s focus on digital decisioning that harnesses access to new, transactional data has attracted attention from industry leaders. Max Firth, former MD of Experian’s Business Information, and Paul Henry, MD of Experian pH, joined the business over the last year. Max is spearheading Funding Xchange’s push into providing decisioning solutions to banks and lenders while Paul is leading the delivery of data analytics, including the recent launch of Funding Xchange’s SME Lending Monitor that is providing unique insights in the rapidly changing market dynamics in SME lending.

Commenting on the investment round, Katrin said:

“We are delighted that Downing and Gresham House have joined us on our exciting journey to help reshape a sector that is rapidly adopting digital solutions using new data sources to enable the delivery of seamless, instant access to finance. This is creating the opportunity to provide small businesses with the same transparency and ease of access to finance that consumers have become accustomed to.    

The funding round will enable us to accelerate the delivery of the next generation of our data and decisioning platform that enables banks and lenders to instantly transform their customer proposition by digitising their customer interfaces and decisioning to deliver personalised and transparent access to their own lending products or refer customers to selected third party lenders.”

Daniel Cheung at Downing Ventures said:

“Funding Xchange is delivering digital solutions that respond to some of the biggest challenges that banks and SME lenders face as the market is undergoing unprecedented change – driven by new lenders and solutions changing the market dynamics, availability of new data and increasing regulatory scrutiny. We were impressed by the advocacy Katrin and her team have built for their data-driven approach. Partners like MoneySuperMarket can instantly give small businesses transparency of funding solutions and ensure that customers are always treated fairly.

The next phase of Funding Xchange’s growth is now seeing lenders leverage Funding Xchange’s digital technology to provide their customers with instant, personalised quotes while reducing their own costs to serve customers by 70%. As a technology and data analytics business, Funding Xchange’s market insights are already helping banks and lenders build and test funding propositions that respond to customer needs and address the funding gap. This is game changing in a market that has been notoriously opaque.”

Henry Alty of Gresham House Ventures said: 

“Under the leadership of Katrin, Max and Paul, Funding Xchange has created a peerless technology that is making the SME lending eco-system more efficient while helping SMEs across the UK compare funding solutions from a wide range of finance providers – giving businesses control over their finance choices. By delivering an end-to-end digital solution, Funding Xchange ensures that customers have access to the best solutions and never pay more than going direct to a lender. This proposition is a direct challenge to the opaque commercial broker market, which is increasingly under scrutiny by regulators. Funding Xchange’s data infrastructure, decisioning technology and digital journeys are a critical part of the infrastructure that is transforming the eco-system. We look forward to supporting Funding Xchange through its high growth phase as the company continues to deliver intelligent lending solutions to businesses and lenders.”

Since its inception, Funding Xchange has helped over 100,000 UK businesses navigate their finance options, while also providing its technology to Price Comparison Websites like MoneySuperMarket and Money.co.uk. It is designated by HM Treasury as a Finance Referral Platform and works with nine UK banks to help their customers access finance solutions if they are not ready for bank finance.

IMAS Corporate Finance acted as the exclusive financial adviser to Funding Xchange on this investment round.

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Georgia Hanias
Ecology Media
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Funding Xchange

Funding Xchange is an intelligent decisioning platform that transforms efficiency in SME lending distribution by holding lenders’ underwriting models and integrating with their decisioning. Funding Xchange accurately mirrors lenders’ decisioning based on their credit policies, affordability models and risk pricing. By using access to live transactional data, including closed group CRA data, Funding Xchange provides accurate, personalised terms for SMEs – and is never more expensive than going direct. By holding decisioning within the Funding Xchange platform, applicants’ personal data is protected, and businesses have full control over the funding process. Through deep integration with lending platforms, businesses can be fully approved for funding within 10 minutes without leaving the Funding Xchange site. For more information please visit the website on www.fundingxchange.co.uk

About Downing Ventures

Downing LLP is an investment manager with over 30 years’ experience, more than £1 billion assets under management and approximately 25,000 investors. The business has made a firm-wide commitment to the principles of responsible investment by assessing opportunities for both their profitability and their environment and social impact. Downing believes this approach can make investments more rewarding: rewarding by being profitable for its investors, rewarding by being supportive to the businesses it funds and, through their success, ultimately rewarding for society.

About Gresham House Ventures and Gresham House

Gresham House Ventures, part of the Gresham House Strategic Equity division, seeks to support exciting UK businesses with bold ambitions for the future, by providing transformational growth capital and expertise to accelerate business potential. For more information about the Gresham House Ventures team’s investment criteria, or if you think you know of a business looking for investment, please visit the website at www.greshamhouseventures.com or get in touch by email to [email protected].

Gresham House plc is an AIM quoted specialist alternative asset manager providing funds, direct investments and tailored investment solutions, including co-investment across a range of highly differentiated alternative investment strategies. The Group’s expertise includes strategic public and private equity, forestry, renewable energy, housing and infrastructure.