FinTech lender CRIF Realtime is partnering with business funding and savings platform Swoop Funding, to help drive credit and loan products to the U.K.’s 5.9 million small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
CRIF’s Credit Passport offers real-time business credit scores for SMBs without leaving any indications on a user’s credit profile. With Swoop, the two companies can tap their complementary resources to match SMBs with credit, lending and savings products that best suit their business needs and financial reality.
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Glen Keller, CRIF Realtime chief product officer, said in a press release on Wednesday (Dec. 29) that the company created Credit Passport to “remove friction” when it came to the lending decision process and deliver SMBs the “right funding for them” at the time they need it.
Keller also said that CRIF is striving to help SMBs become better educated about finances so they can grow “financially healthy and resilient companies.”
Collaborating with Swoop positions CRIF “at the heart of the U.K.’s [SMBs] with useful information at a time when they need it the most and will really make a difference to the market,” Keller added.
Read more: Funding Circle, Atom Partner On Lending For UK SMBs
By leveraging CRIF’s Credit Passport scoring system, Swoop can tap its experts to determine what funding matches are the best fit for a particular business. Other financial services products are also custom-matched, including savings, credit and more.
“The Swoop State of Business survey 2021 revealed that 90% of small business owners don’t know their credit score,” said Andrea Reynolds, founder and CEO at Swoop. “This partnership with Credit Passport enables us to support our customers with immediate insight into their own credit score and how it influences the funding they can access.”
In a collaboration between PYMNTS and Elan (a division of U.S. Bank), Credit Score Literacy and Building Credit Report, 70% of those surveyed thought their credit scores were higher than the score was in reality.
Just 8% of respondents thought they had below-average scores, whereas the reality was 21% had scores under 600, the marker for below-average.
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