Helping small businesses in the U.K. maximize the opportunities of Open Banking is the goal of the new partnership forged between AccountScore and financial data sharing and standardization specialist Validis. The two companies announced that they will work together to ensure that SMEs get access to more transparent financial services, and that U.K. institutions gain the most accurate financial overview of their clients.
The agreement between the AISP accredited Open Banking platform and Validis will enable small businesses to share financial data with a single click through a single, consent-driven workflow. Banks can visualize the data from an “insight-fueled interface” and track critical processes like loan originations. This collaboration will help institutions develop more personalized banking services for specific businesses, and enhance their ability to make better, more accurate decisions faster.
“As Open Banking becomes more established, having a single intuitive workflow where SMEs can share their data easily and securely opens up huge possibilities for financial services,” AccountScore CEO Emma Steeley said. “Our unique relationship with Validis ensures we can visualize all the financial data required to help these institutions tailor their services, make the right decisions, and identify insights that they could not previously.”
In addition to helping businesses and financial institutions make more of their data, the ability of different datasets to complement each other – using management account data to confirm bank transaction data, for example – adds new value to the processes financial institutions conduct every day. This is value institutions have not been able to capture until recently.
“We are excited to sign this partnership agreement with AccountScore,” Validis CEO Joel Curry said. “For too long financial institutions were only seeing individual pieces of the puzzle, but now they will have access to all the data, all in one place.” Curry called the partnership “a truly innovative step forward for small business financial services.”
AccountScore demonstrated its consents.online solution at FinovateEurope earlier this year. Consents.online is the consent management feature of the company’s Open Banking solution, and helps users manage their online consents in one centralized location. Customers can visit consents.online and review what data has been accessed and by whom, as well as change consent permissions.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in London, U.K., AccountScore has partnered with The Insolvency Panel earlier this year to develop a solution for the debt and debt solutions sector to give financially challenged individuals the ability to more easily share their financial data with financial institutions. In February, Freedom Finance announced that it had reduced application time to five minutes thanks to technology from AccountScore.