Use Team Ups with Plaid

• Capitalise, a UK-based business finance platform, has established a strategic partnership with data and open finance network Plaid.
• The collaboration combines Plaid’s open banking services with Capitalise’s Instant Offers to simplify and accelerate small business financing.
• Capitalize made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2016. Plaid has been a Finovate alum since 2014.

UK based business finance platform Use the capital THERE announced a strategic collaboration along with fellow Finovate alum Plaid. The partnership is designed to simplify business financing, leveraging Open Banking to offer pre-approvals to 150,000 small businesses. Capitalize will integrate Plaid’s Open Banking services into it Instant Offers solution for businesses to get pre-approvals from multiple lenders. Businesses can receive offers and receive funding in minutes rather than days or weeks.

The partnership enhances Capitalise’s lending origination service by removing friction from the funding process. It also helps improve conversions thanks to faster decision-making that relies on accurate, real-time data. The collaboration comes at a time when an increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK are adopting open banking technology. Plaid reports that the adoption of open banking by UK-based SMEs has increased by 18% year-on-year.

“Open Banking sits at the core of SME credit decision-making and brings confidence to underwriting risk assessments,” said Capitalize Co-Founder Ollie Maitland. “These developments, together with the huge growth in private loan markets, will bring down the high cost of non-bank lending. This is good news for small businesses in the UK.”

Open banking brings faster application processes, access to real-time financial data to speed up approvals, and the ability to offer personalized payments, which lowers costs borrower. Challenger banks and alternative lenders have become major players in the market for SME lending, representing more than 60% of new SME lending in the UK. .

“Pre-approvals are the perfect use case for Open Banking as a win for business owners browsing and great pre-qualification for lenders looking to lend,” said said Maitland. “Plaid was a natural choice given their experience in SME lending and their global presence.”

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Plaid offers an international data and open financial network that helps make payments simpler and lending more accessible. With over 100 million global users in more than 18 countries, Plaid’s technology helps institutions leverage open banking and open financial connectivity to grow revenues and fight fraud. Plaid works with more than 12,000 companies – including members of the Fortune 500 – to help them give their customers more choice and control over their financial lives.

Capitalize made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2016. At the conference, Maitland and co-founder Paul Surtees demonstrated how the company’s platform uses behavioral data to match and rank lenders and algorithms to compare superiors of 2,500 data points to find the most suitable funding solution for businesses. Today, the company’s lending market has 100 lenders, including 10 integrated Open Finance lenders in its Instant Offers framework.

Interested in demoing at FinovateEurope 2025 in London? Applications are still being accepted from new companies with new solutions ready to be demonstrated. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today to learn more.

Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash

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