The Funding Cloud (™) journey – 6 months on

What is Funding Cloud (™)?

Funding Cloud (™) is our digital platform matching SMEs to lenders to facilitate fast access to business finance. The aim of the platform is to break down barriers to funding and empower businesses with the funding they need to recover, trade or grow. The platform relies on precise lender matching and real-time funding decisions. 

How it used to work

Funding Cloud (™) leveraged our internal matching engine to match business owners with lenders and present them options they could apply for. Business customers would choose a product to apply for and Funding Cloud (™) would digitally send the application to the lender. 

What it does now

Funding Cloud (™) has evolved from being a matching and application submission tool into one that matches and retrieves real-time quotes and offers from lenders. These quotes and offers are presented to the business customer, who can make an informed decision. 

What else has changed?

The changes we’ve made to the platform so far have all revolved around one aim: to give our customers the best possible experience. 

We launched Funding Cloud (™)on 6 April with five lenders on board. We’ve since added a new lender and are working on new integrations to grow our panel even further. The speed of responses from our lenders has improved as a result of work in the solution’s backend. 

We’ve optimised Funding Cloud (™) by utilising the Open Banking data we collect from customers and sending it over to lenders so they can understand more about the customer. This helps lenders make more informed decisions about offers and eligibility. 

By improving the quality of the information we capture – and utilising 3rd party data sources – our customers are able to receive more confident offers from lenders.

We also reviewed our user journey by analysing how customers interact with the platform. In order to improve customers’ experience of Funding Cloud (™) and what they see on the screen when they use it, we looked at customer pain points and actioned customer feedback.  

Headline statistics so far:

• Average approval time: ~1 minute

• Average drawdown time: ~35 minutes following offer

• Fastest time from loan application to credit approval is 20 seconds

• Fastest time from loan application to cash in the bank is 18 mins

Team working on tech project

What’s next for Funding Cloud (™)?

We’ve been busy working on the development of the Lender API, which allows lenders to join Funding Cloud (™) and enjoy its benefits.

We’ll be providing lenders with the documentation needed to connect to us, and our awesome tech team will be on hand to support lenders throughout the integration.

Key points:

• Instant notifications inform the lender that a customer has matched their eligibility criteria. Lenders can choose to pull lead matches once a day so they don’t have to match with leads on a one-by-one basis.

• Lenders can query historic lead information.

• Lenders can integrate in their own time and not be bound by as many dependencies on Funding Cloud (™). Funding Options will provide all the documentation required to integrate online, and the team will be available to support and test integrations.

• Lenders receive event-driven notifications on customer updates e.g. document uploads, quote/offer being accepted, customer having accepted funding elsewhere.

• Customers need only upload a document once and don’t need to use multiple portals. In other words, we do the leg work for customers and tell them which forms need to be shared with which lenders.

Are you interested in joining our growing Funding Cloud (™) lender panel? Or are you a business owner looking for fast, hassle-free access to funding? Sign up to Funding Cloud (™)today.