Swoop wins Open Banking Challenge Award

Swoop wins Open Banking Challenge Award

Swoop are delighted to announce that we have been selected as one of 12 finalists of the Open Banking Challenge and have been awarded £100,000.  The Challenge – is a prize fund backing ambitious products that will help small businesses save time and money, find better services, reduce stress and discover the intelligence in their financial data through the use of the Open Banking API.  The competition was funded by the main UK banks and managed by Nesta, the Global Innovation Foundation.

Swoop will use the  grant to develop our business current account comparison and switching feature enabling businesses to bank with their optimal provider within minutes with zero friction.

We’re excited to integrate with Open Banking (OB) and to build these much needed solutions.  We see it as a perfect complement to our current offering of matching businesses to the right blend of funding across loans, investment and grants in one application.

By combining data from OB to our other data sources including accounting softwares, Companies House and Duedil we can instantly match your business not only to the right funding but to the right bank account for your needs.  The bank account switch will be frictionless as Swoop does the heavy lifting, gathering the information required through our data sources and automatically providing this to the Current Account Switching Service on your behalf.

Swoop’s Delight

To receive the support and backing from NESTA and the judging panel is a big boost for our product and direction of travel. Swoop was born out of the frustrations of not knowing where to go to get access to funding or information, so we are incredibly excited to help SMEs navigate their funding journeys more quickly and more transparently through our platform.

The prize is backed by the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) with funding from eight of the UK’s largest providers of SME banking: Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, Santander, AIB Group (UK) plc, Bank of Ireland UK and Danske Bank.

Swoop CEO & Founder Andrea Reynolds is thrilled to have been selected as a finalist and is itching to get started on product development.

“I have been helping small and medium businesses access funding for over a decade and I have never been more optimistic about the future.  SMEs are the engine of the economy yet they have been underserved when it comes to accessing funding and the right bank provider. Open Banking and Swoop changes all of that. That is why we exist.”

So what’s next?

Stay tuned over the summer and autumn as we start to roll out our new Open Banking integration along with other enhanced data integrations. We’re excited to see the product grow and look forward to on-boarding more and more UK and Irish businesses along the way.

The 9 largest banks have made their APIs live and available and we’ll be tapping into that data to enhance Swoop’s offering, so that business owners, like you, get the information you need, quickly and easily to understand the best banking and funding decisions to make.

We’d like to thank all our customers who have started on this journey with us so far. If you want to be first in line to gain access to our new business banking smart engine, then make sure to set up with an account on Swoop today!

If you have any questions on Open Banking or thoughts on the Swoop product, you can get in touch with us at hello@swoopfunding.com.