UK SME lender B-North adds TruNarrative to its tech stack

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
19th May 2020

B-North, a UK-based small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lender in the making, has chosen regtech solution provider TruNarrative to underpin its customer onboarding, compliance and financial crime prevention capabilities.

The challenger says the integration will allow it to lend to businesses “up to ten times faster” than large incumbents.

TruNarrative will join B-North’s other tech partners, which include Mambu’s core banking, nCino’s loan originations platform, and Newcastle Strategic Solutions’s deposit-taking solution.

Chief financial officer Dave Broadbent and CEO Jonathan Thompson

Founded in 2018, the fintech is led by CEO Jonathan Thompson, a former managing director at Santander, and chief financial officer Dave Broadbent, who spent more than 16 years at International Personal Finance, a UK-based international home credit business.

The start-up raised £2 million in January, and plans on fundraising again to secure its banking licence and launch its lending services in the second half of 2020.

It wants to offer mid-to-high value loans – £500,000 to £5 million – based on the face-to-face, regional experience of a traditional bank, but with the speed and agility of a fintech. B-North says it would be able to turnaround loans in 10 days.

TruNarrative’s technology will deliver checks and ongoing monitoring against companies, their directors and associated third parties, as well as providing the fintech with an audit trail for instant recall of all data for regulatory purposes.

The start-up says it is outsourcing its tech instead of building it to provide “a quick route-to-live mode”.

“TruNarrative has been working with B-North since early 2019 and I am delighted that they will be becoming one of our newest customers,” says the regtech provider’s head of banking Edward Vaughan.

In October 2019, B-North CEO Thompson told FinTech Futures that the start-up is the “antithesis to everyone set up in London”.

Instead of being distracted by a saturated challenger market, the fintech wants to be a debt specialist and set up regional pods starting with Manchester, then Yorkshire, London and the Midlands. Eventually, it sees expansion into Northern Ireland and Scotland too.

Last year, the fintech bagged Ron Emerson CBE as its chairman. Emerson was the founding chair of the British Business Bank and trails a blue chip banking career spanning Standard Chartered Bank, Bank of America and Amsterdam Trade Bank.