Iwoca
iwoca
British credit financing company
iwoca Ltd. (/ɪˈwɒkə/) is an online credit financing company based in London. It offers credit facilities to small businesses trading in the UK and Germany via an automated lending platform. CEO Christoph Rieche and CTO James Dear founded iwoca in October 2011 and the company started trading in March 2012. They aimed to offer custom-built loans to small businesses, who usually struggled with fair access to finance from big banks. To start with, these were exclusively e-commerce businesses, but in April 2014, iwoca began lending to all types of small businesses. By July 2015, it was reported to have seen 250% year-on-year growth in issuance.[2]
iwoca provides credit lines of up to £200,000 and business loans of up to £500,000. It uses various machine learning models to automatically assess businesses based on data taken directly from Xero, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, Sage Pay, business bank accounts and other online and offline platforms.[1] This follows a similar model to the one used by Kabbage in the United States.[3] It's also integrated its credit API with the Tide bank.[4] A 3% monthly interest rate and maximum loan term of 12 months are typical.[5]
In 2018, iwoca doubled its revenues to £48 million and reached profitability.[6]
As of October 2019, iwoca had funded more than £1 billion to over 30,000 businesses[7] since inception and made funding available to over 50,000 across a range of industries through its platform in the UK and Germany and has raised £350 million in equity and debt finance. Its platform and successes were referenced by Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney in a speech about technology and small business lending at the Lord Mayor's Banquet for Bankers and Merchants of the City of London.[8]