Biz Loan Shopping Becomes As Easy As Grocery Shopping

In markets where alternative lending is booming, small businesses may have more of a choice to access financial products, but many experts say SMEs are actually overwhelmed by the number of choices they have when it comes to choosing a lender with which to work.

For the developers of Funding Xchange, they wanted business loan shopping to be as simple as, for example, comparing products at a grocery store. It’s no wonder that Funding Xchange launches on the market from the same people that made U.K. online grocery commerce platform Ocado.

“At Ocado, our focus was to cut through the complexity of grocery shopping and change the way consumers shopped for food,” said cofounder and chief technology officer Olivier Beau de Lomenie in an interview with the Yorkshire Post, published Monday (June 15). “Funding Xchange is no exception. It brings clarity and simplicity to a process that is notoriously tricky and opaque.”

Funding Xchange was born out of the need for small business owners to have a more transparent approach to finding a loan. According to Beau de Lomenie and fellow cofounder Katrin Herrling, the platform sought to fix a process for finding loans outside of a bank, which many SMEs find confusing. According to the company, two-thirds of businesses approach just one potential lender. More than half of small business borrowers (60 percent) spend less than two hours researching their options.

The new platform understands the time restrictions of small businesses and thus makes it easier to compare benefits and costs of lending options.

Herrling especially knows the challenges of running a small business; according to reports, she was a former SME specialist at Bain and Company.

“As consumers we have benefited hugely from price comparison websites,” she told reporters. “We bring the same benefits to a market where shopping around previously consumed a huge amount of time and energy. We have done all the legwork, so it is now easy for businesses to get quotes from a wide range of lenders.”