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UK-based SME lending bank, B-North has selected Wiserfunding as its risk grading partner in a bid to speed up credit profile assessments of SMEs as well as to support B-North underwriters to make better lending decisions. The SME lending bank is expected to utilise Wiserfunding’s prediction solution alongside traditional human underwriting methods.

B-North will be adding Wiserfunding to its tech-stack that includes other solutions like Mambu’s banking engine, nCino’s cloud-based loan and deposit origination solution and TruNarrative’s RegTech platform for compliance and onboarding.

Jonathan Thompson, CEO of B-North, has commented, “… The fact that Wiserfunding specialises in the SME sector and allows us to draw on its innovative predictive capabilities makes it a perfect fit for B-North, and it’s goals. Whilst underwriting decisions in B-North will ultimately be down to human judgement. Wiserfunding will allow us to deepen our understanding of potential borrowers whilst allowing us to accelerate the process of lending to SMEs.”

Wiserfunding offers credit risk assessment solution which adopts the use of AI and cloud technology to source structured and unstructured data and generates the Altman SME Z-score, used to predict a company’s viability. The company claims to have a 90% prediction accuracy when assessing the credit risk of SMEs.

Dr Gabriele Sabato, CEO & Co-Founder of Wiserfunding, has commented,” Without any doubt, B-North represents one of the most exciting and credible specialist SME banks that is about to launch in the UK. So, we are really pleased to have the opportunity to support them in building their business. Our mission at Wiserfunding is to empower SMEs’ growth, but our powerful risk assessment platform would not go very far without SME lending experts such as the B-North team.

“In this difficult moment for the UK economy, we look forward to powering up B-North origination, allowing them to support a larger number of small businesses by drastically reducing their decisioning time.”

Recently, B-North announced the appointment of Rebecca Owen as its first Regional Managing Director, who is expected to be responsible for developing and launching the company’s first’ lending pod’ in Manchester. B-North’s model is built upon the premise of operating regional ‘lending pods’ which include specialist lending bankers, underwriters and valuers across the UK.

Source: https://ibsintelligence.com/ibs-journal/ibs-news/b-north-selects-wiserfunding-to-boost-sme-credit-risk-assessment/