Ten companies have been selected by UK innovation foundation Nesta to receive £100,000 each for their developments in supporting small businesses through new Open Banking technology.

Selected by an independent judging panel in Nesta’s Open Up Challenge, the 10 companies represent a mix of established and early stage FinTechs who are adopting data-driven approaches to solve banking problems faced by small businesses. These issues include automating burdensome processes, making access to finance simpler, democratising financial advice, and increasing choice and transparency in financial services.

The 10 winners are:

- Bud
- Capitalise
- Coconut
- Credit Data Research
- Fluidly
- Fractal Labs
- Funding Options
- Handle (by Bizfitech)
- Iwoca
- Teller

Stage 1 of the Open Up Challenge saw 20 companies each receive a £50,000 development grant and exclusive access to the Open Up Data Sandbox, which contains one of the largest anonymised UK banking transaction datasets available for open innovation.

Chris Gorst, challenge prize lead at Nesta, commented: “We would like to congratulate all the teams that participated so far in the Open Up Challenge. The ten teams awarded a prize in Stage 1 demonstrated to the judging panel that they are using new technologies to solve real small business problems and have the potential to achieve impact at scale in 2018 and beyond.

“Useful innovation has been slow to come in small business banking, imposing real costs on the entrepreneurial economy and hitting small business productivity,” he continued. “But the UK is perfectly placed to make rapid progress, as a global leader in FinTech and open data innovation. Open Banking could radically reduce barriers for new players and models to emerge and this is good news for small businesses.”

Charlotte Crosswell, CEO of FinTech membership association Innovate Finance, added: “We would like to congratulate all the finalists of this important challenge, and are delighted to see so many of our members in the final list. Together these companies represent the blueprint for the future of finance and what open banking can do to help small businesses deliver better services to consumers.”

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