MarketInvoice launches business loans on back of PSD2, open banking

MarketInvoice

Market Invoice co-founders Ilya Kondrashov, left, and Anil Stocker, right.

A digital invoice finance platform in the U.K. will provide business loans to its customers for the first time, it was announced Wednesday.

Financial technology company MarketInvoice enables businesses to sell their unpaid invoices to provide working capital.

The firm said it would expand into the business lending market, pitting it against established players such as U.S. listed peer-to-peer lender LendingClub and Britain’s Funding Circle. The latter raised £82 million ($100 million) in funding from venture capital investors earlier this year.

Peer-to-peer lenders connect lenders to borrowers through an online platform. Businesses apply for a loan and are matched with an investor. They then repay the loan to the peer-to-peer platform, which is then distributed to the investors.

CEO and co-founder Anil Stocker told CNBC that MarketInvoice will take advantage of an incoming European Union regulation called the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which forces banks to open up data about their customers to third party companies.

“PSD2 is a regulatory change that is going to be a real catalyst for us because we’re able to get access to SME (small to medium-sized enterprise) customer information,” Stocker said in a phone interview Tuesday.

“We can use things like machine learning and artificial intelligence to build better credit scores with this data. I think the banks are starting to realize that this world they’ve had guarded around customer data for so long, now it’s starting to open up.”