Apple Acquires UK’s Credit Kudos

Apple has bought the U.K. open banking startup Credit Kudos in a transaction estimated at $150 million a report said Wednesday March 23.

Credit Kudos’ services offer insights and scores on loan applicants drawn from bank data, particularly transaction and loan outcome data. It’s sourced from the U.K.’s open banking framework. The application programming interface (API) offers lenders better decision making, less risk and more acceptance rates.

The report from The Block news site noted that Credit Kudos last raised money at the height of the pandemic, in April 2020. Then it was able to nail down £5 million, or $6.5 million.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the development of various online industries as consumers across the world faced varying levels of restrictions on movement and public venues, including shopping centers and banks, were closed down or made harder to access.

That round was led by AlbionVC, with TriplePoint Capital, Plug and Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, Entrepreneur First and several angel backers.

Credit Kudos was founded in 2015 by Freddy Kelly and Matt Schofield. It’s one of many big European open banking acquisitions in the last year. However this is the first one to be subsumed by a tech giant of Apple’s size.

Read more: Open Banking, the UK Experience

The report notes that there’s no indication what Apple has planned for Credit Kudos. Apple has branched out over the years, extending far beyond its initial stronghold of home computers and high-end smartphones into various areas of the digital economy including video streaming, cloud storage, and payment systems.

Credit Kudos teamed with Atom Bank last year to add open data capabilities for business loan affordability assessments, PYMNTS wrote.

The goal is to deliver over £1 billion in lending in the next two years. Atom Bank plans to use Credit Kudos’ categorization and risk insights to automate underwriting, which will allow faster decision making.

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