Swoop Funding chooses ForwardAI to improve SMBs’ access to loans

ForwardAI, which provides aggregated access to accounting and business data, has formed a partnership with business funding and savings platform Swoop Funding, with the aim to improve the accuracy of loan underwriting decisions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The new partnership will also help to expand credit access to more SMBs.

Swoop Funding, which is described as a “one-stop money shop” for businesses in Australia, the UK, Canada and Ireland, will be able to use ForwardAI’s ‘Precise API’ to access normalised and standardised accounting data that has been designed to make it easier for lenders to customise the information they are seeking.

With access to historical, real-time, and predictive performance data, Swoop will be able to determine a business’s future viability more accurately.

Nick Chandi, CEO and co-founder of ForwardAI, said Swoop shared its mission of democratising access to small business loans.

“Traditional underwriting methods often rely on manual data collection, while one-off data connections to numerous accounting and business platforms require data to be normalised before it can be used,” he said.

“Our technology provides Swoop with a reliable API for integrated access to accounting, banking, and financial data that’s both ready-to-use and easily scalable.”

Ciaran Burke, co-founder and COO of Swoop, added: “Our customers want choice and speed without sacrificing quality and security. By partnering with ForwardAI we are joining forces in a way that will have a huge positive benefit to our customers.”

In an article for Open Banking Expo, ForwardAI’s Chandi wrote about why Canada needs to move on from screen-scraping if it is to implement Open Banking by 2023.