MarketInvoice is the latest alternative lender to launch a partnership with a traditional financial institution (FI), with reports on Thursday (Dec. 14) noting the U.K. company is now collaborating with Investec.
According to news from Bloomberg, MarketInvoice’s collaboration with the bank sees the company underwriting small business financing provided by Investec — based in the U.K. and South Africa — which will reportedly allocate $67 million in the first year of the partnership. MarketInvoice links SMBs to invoice financing services and, through this partnership, will manage underwriting and payment processing.
Reports noted that the collaboration could be a reflection of European Union (EU) law that promotes data sharing and cooperation between FinTechs and traditional lenders.
“There are a lot of banks looking for ways to collaborate with FinTechs,” said MarketInvoice Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Anil Stocker in an interview. “We think that open banking could be a bigger shift in the market than Brexit.”
The U.K. is readying for its own Open Banking rules as well as PSD2, the EU’s open banking and data-sharing legislation that aims to boost competition in the financial services space. Key to these rules is the ability they lend FinTechs to access data from banks to use within their own third-party apps and services.
Stocker told Bloomberg he predicts more collaborations are likely headed to the market in 2018 as a result of these legislative forces.
Separate reports in The Financial Times said that, while traditional lenders have already begun to strike partnerships with FinTechs, the MarketInvoice/Investec tie-up is the first in which a bank outsources client-facing services to a FinTech.
Earlier this year, MarketInvoice announced the addition of euro and U.S. dollar capabilities to its invoice financing service, which means U.K. customers can now access funding for their non-U.K. invoices.
