Crowdz selects GoCardless for open banking payment solutions
Invoice financing platform Crowdz has partnered with payments provider GoCardless to provide open banking payments solutions in four markets.
Crowdz – a marketplace that connects sellers and funders of receivables – will incorporate three GoCardless payment features powered by open banking to improve its payment and risk modelling capabilities.
These features are Instant Bank Pay in the UK, USA and Europe to collect instant, one-off payments directly from a bank account, Verified Mandates in the UK, USA and Europe for greater fraud protection and PayTo integration in Australia for instant payments and account verification.
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Crowdz offers an alternative financing solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who struggle to access capital via banks and lenders. It secured $10m (£8.8m) in investment earlier this year led by Citi and Global Cleantech Capital.
Its proprietary risk assessment model, the SuRF score, claims to enable more equitable financing than a traditional credit score through data. Crowdz’s platform uses blockchain technology for secure, transparent transactions.
“With our global expansion plans and our target of providing 25,000 SMEs with over $1bn in working capital by the end of 2023, we needed a partner that could offer the right coverage, technology and expertise,” said Payson E Johnston, chief executive and co-founder of Crowdz. “That’s where GoCardless comes in.”
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To date, one of Crowdz key deals includes providing the tech behind a Meta (formerly Facebook) SME financing programme.
This year, GoCardless raised its Series G funding round to accelerate its open banking strategy and announced the acquisition of Nordigen, the freemium open banking data provider.
And last month it introduced Verified Mandates, which leverages automatic identification system technology to prevent fraud, in France.
“Thanks to our global bank payment network, we’ll be able to accelerate their speed-to-market and offer cutting-edge payment solutions, making it that much easier for SMEs to gain access to working capital all over the world”, said Duncan Barrigan, chief product officer and chief growth officer at GoCardless.
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