We like to be proactive in offering the best financing products for our customers. To us, that means offering funding that’s easy and quick to access. Why? So you can focus your time on growing your business, not waiting for your cash to come in.

We’ve made a few quiet changes to our verification process over the past couple of months that have helped our customers access their funds in less time than ever before. And we’re only just beginning to roll it out.

Now you can reduce the time it takes for funds to get to you by seamlessly connecting your business bank account to your MarketFinance account. This new feature is called Open Banking, and it allows us to verify your invoices at an unprecedented rate. What does that mean in real terms? Well, we’re already seeing funds land in customers’ accounts in half the time.

Why do we think Open Banking is the future?

There are three main reasons why we wanted to streamline the verification process:

• To get funds into a customer’s account faster
• To protect our customers’ confidentiality
• To continue innovating and pushing our technology forward

Reducing time to funds through unverified trading

We’ve been working closely with our teams across the business to update the invoice verification policy. This is the process we carry out to make sure an invoice is legitimate. To do this, we use a discreet online invoice verification tool to check your invoices with your customer. They get an email asking them to quickly confirm the details of your uploaded invoice. In just a few clicks we can trust their relationship with you.

But we decided that there has got to be a better way to do this. We asked ourselves what the point was in going to a giant corporation, like Amazon, to confirm that they’re a real business. Sometimes it simply makes more sense to trust a relationship is real.

We decided to introduce unverified trading limits. What this means is that we can fund higher value invoices without needing any verification. Taking out this element means there are fewer hold ups and a shortened process to get your funds directly to you.

Speeding things up further with Open Banking

For customers who want funds even faster, we’re taking this further by introducing our Open Banking feature. When a customer chooses to connect their business account to their MarketFinance account, they allow us to view their transactions. This technology gives us the ability to make more informed decisions about their customer base and business activity. So we can verify the activity faster and trust a higher invoice value without spending time checking it out first.

Confidentiality is key

We don’t need to emphasise the benefits of getting your funds to you faster, that’s no doubt an obvious and welcome change. But opting in to Open Banking also gives a business greater control when it comes to owning their customer relationships. By increasing the value of invoices they can trade unverified, our contact with their customers is also reduced.

Open Banking may feel a little unfamiliar, but you’ve probably been doing something similar with your accounting software for years. It’s a quick and easy way to make sure all your financial tools are working together for your business. It has seen a massive surge in use over the past year. Open Banking is government-backed and trusted as a secure way to share your data. Essentially it gives providers like us the ability to view your financial information without compromising your protection and keeping control in your hands.

Always innovating

We’re committed to leading innovation in the fintech landscape. We always have an eye on how we can harness and develop the technology we use to make business finance easy to use.

We’re being proactive about unverified limits and Open Banking is a key enabler for this. Connecting a business bank account to a customer’s MarketFinance account is a vital step in allowing us to better inform our policies and processes to help us understand and serve businesses better.

We’re making these changes to pass on the benefit to customers. In our mind, the faster you can reliably get access to working capital, the faster you’re able to get on with running your business. And we want to be there with you for the journey.