iwoca Notches £100M To Support Pandemic Relief Loans

U.K. FinTech iwoca has notched £100 million in funding to help coronavirus business interruption loan scheme (CBILS) clients. The company intends to grow its CBILS program and begin taking new client applications with the financing it raised, according to a Monday (August 3) announcement.

iwoca said that banks have experienced much interest from companies looking for financial help via CBILS. As a result, they are grappling with an influx of new applications. The company is looking to work with banks to ensure that companies can gain quick access to the CBILS finance solution.

“We want to give small businesses the best chance of finding the support they so clearly need, which means the banks must work with us,” iwoca CEO and Co-founder Christoph Rieche said in the announcement. “It’s not acceptable that thousands of the businesses applying for CBILS are left hanging for weeks or even months without getting a decision from their bank.

The company is seeking to have the biggest banks in Britain send business that they can’t accommodate to FinTech providers. Additionally, iwoca noted that the gap between the volume of applications and approvals have expanded each week since the rollout of its Bounce Bank Loans.

Seperately, iwoca has rolled out its iwocaPay service, meant to mitigate the challenges of unpaid invoices by instantaneously paying suppliers while letting companies pay on their own time. The rollout comes amid a crunch on trade credit, which has seen one in four companies concerned that they won’t weather the current economic climate.

In March, iwoca unveiled its new OpenLending platform, which can connect banks and FinTechs while extending the company’s lending capabilities to the two million British companies that could potentially need it. At the time, it was noted that mobile app Monese recently became a part of the platform, and that digital accounting technology Xero intended to join soon.