Members of London’s FinTech community have joined forces to build a proof of concept (PoC) to help the UK’s five million self-employed through the COVID-19 crisis.

The Covid Credit prototype allows the self-employed to generate a self-declaration of loss of income due to Coronavirus, verified by Open Banking data.

It was built remotely by a team of FinTech entrepreneurs from a team comprising Credit Kudos, Fronted, 11:FS, Coconut, Capital on Tap, Mazuma, SeedLegals and TrueLayer, which collaborated on its design over one weekend.

The open source idea allows a self-employed person to self-certify and evidence their loss of income due to Coronavirus through a website. It then uses Open Banking to collect 12 months of historic banking data, proving previous income and predicting future loss of income.

The result is a minted declaration document that serves as self-certification by the sole trader.

The group believes that Covid Credit could ease the significant administrative burden on the civil service and the already stretched banking sector in the United Kingdom, while ensuring Britain’s small business sector makes it through the economic strains of the pandemic.

It is hoped that the data sharing tool will enable banks to release loans faster to businesses meaning entrepreneurs could bounce back faster from disruption.

The UK’s 4.9 million self-employed and small businesses contribute £275 billion to the British economy.

The group is hoping to share the project with the widest possible audience and to trial it with a small group of self-employed people in the coming days.

Freddy Kelly, founder and chief executive of Credit Kudos, said: “The Covid Credit team came together as a group to design a concept that verifies the income trend of self-employed workers - the process features self-certification combined with impartially retrieved banking data to deliver a comprehensive view of someone’s income.

“In this way, we hope, the government may be able to assess the self-employed in the same way that they can the full-time employed."

The teams developed a standalone Python web application which is running on Google Cloud. This application interacts directly with the Credit Kudos API which, in turn, aggregates data from individuals’ bank accounts and applies a number of pattern recognition algorithms in order to deduce the key income figures for the statement.

The team are currently engaging with a number of key stakeholders across the Tresury, HM Revenue & Customs and the Financial Conduct Authority in a bid to move into a beta testing phase and then to a wider roll-out.

Simon Taylor, co-founder of 11:FS, added: “The government is working incredibly hard to support UK business at such an unprecedented time; we believe Covid Credit can provide a crucial piece of this complex puzzle.”

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