The board of Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) has awarded £10 million grants from its Capability and Innovation Fund Pool C to Atom Bank, iwoca, Modulr Finance and The Currency Cloud Group.

This fund is designed to facilitate the expansion of business offerings to include lending or payments services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom, or international payments services to SMEs in the United Kingdom.

The successful applicants will shortly be invited to enter into an agreement with BCR, with a set of public commitments that are measured for progress on a quarterly basis.

BCR chairman Godfrey Cromwell commented: “Pool C centres on lending and payments services to SMEs – the four selected organisations address these areas and complete our portfolio of CIF grants.”

“Now the emphasis is on monitoring each recipient’s reporting and deliverables,” he continued, adding: “Their public commitments can be seen on our website and performance against these will be regularly updated there.”

BCR received a total of 76 applications for the Pool C process during an application window between 1 May and 28 June.

Christoph Rieche, iwoca’s chief executive and co-founder, stated: “We’re confident that we’ll be delivering on our commitment to make £5 billion available to 150,000 SMEs by 2023.

“Winning the grant enables us to accelerate our mission to make finance available to one million SMEs.”

Mike Laven, chief executive of Currencycloud, said: “Traditional models of international payments have long failed small businesses, who have limited access to really great cross-border banking options – the industry has been so far focused on improving the experience when paying suppliers.

“Through our established network of providers across the UK, Currencycloud is building products to reach parts of the market currently underserved by traditional players.”

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