Lending FinTech Oaknorth lands $100m funding
Written by Hannah McGrath
07/09/2018
Acorn Oaknorth, a London-based FinTech lender, has secured $100 million in funding in a deal that values the company at $2.3 billion.
Oaknorth, the groups’ UK lending arm, will have a loan book of $2.8 billion by the end of the year and has lent more than $ 1.7 billion of new capital to more than 300 UK businesses since it secured a banking licence in 2015.
The group claims that its loans have directly helped with the creation of over 8,500 new homes and 8,000 new jobs in the UK.
The funding round was led by two Singaporean state-backed funds EDBO and GIC, along with NIBC bank, Clermont Group and Coltrane Asset Management, making up a 4.3 per cent holding in total.
The investment will be used to develop its machine learning credit monitoring platform Acorn Machine, which is currently licensed to more than 10 international banks.
The fresh funding will also be used to grow Acorn’s global operations, with the platform expecting by the end of the year to hold over $5 billion in assets under service across clients in the US, Europe and Asia along with offices in New York, London and Singapore.
Chu Swee Yeok, chief executive and president of the EDBI of Singapore, said: “By leveraging machine learning, proprietary and third-party data sources, as well as credit analysis competencies, we believe the platform can help address the underserved SME loans segment in the region, improving financial institutions’ cost efficiency and underwriting processes.”
