Last week I wrote about what open banking data actually tells a lender, and ended with a promise dressed up as a pun: the next improvement was in the pipeline. I can now be specific, because it is live. YouLend and Cubefunder are the first lenders on our panel to receive an applicant’s open banking data directly from Fundably, with the applicant’s consent, in the shape our pipeline has already verified. One connection. One consent. Nobody authorises the same bank account twice.
What problem does this actually solve?
Until now, the market’s version of open banking had a quietly absurd step in the middle. An applicant connects their bank to us, we verify and normalise the feed, our matching engine runs each lender’s underwriting against it, and the application goes to the lenders it fits. And then, at the moment everything should accelerate, the receiving lender says: lovely, now please connect your bank account again, to us this time.
The same account. The same transactions. The same PSD2 consent flow, re-performed for an audience of one more institution. The applicant who connected their account to ask for £25,000 is asked to connect it again so that someone can give them the £25,000. For a business owner applying in a spare hour between actual work, it is the digital equivalent of being asked for your passport twice at the same border, and it is where a measurable share of applications simply stall. Every reauthorisation is a moment for the applicant to be busy, sceptical or on a train.
How does one-consent sharing work?
The mechanics are deliberately boring, which regular readers will recognise as the house style. When an applicant connects open banking, they now grant one explicit, scoped consent that covers two things: our reading of the data, and its onward transmission to the specific lenders their application is matched to. Consent is granular and revocable, the account holder can withdraw it at any time, and all processing stays EU-resident under UK GDPR, exactly as it does for every other route through our pipeline.
What the lender receives is not a login, not a token to the applicant’s bank, and not a pile of screenshots. It is the normalised transaction schema I described in the last post: the same shape our own matching engine underwrites against, produced from the bank feed we hold under the applicant’s consent. The lender’s credit team starts from data that arrives pre-verified, continuous and machine-readable, rather than from a second integration’s view of the same account.
Why did YouLend and Cubefunder go first?
Because the fit is natural on both sides. YouLend, our flagship merchant cash advance provider, underwrites on the texture of daily takings, which is exactly what a live verified feed shows best. Cubefunder lends on the practical reality of a business’s cash flow rather than a scorecard, which makes clean transaction data the whole conversation. Both were already among the fastest lenders on the panel, with decisions in 24 to 48 hours; removing the reauthorisation step removes the main thing that ever slowed that down.
I will be honest about what this required, because it is the part I find genuinely significant. A lender accepting data through this route is trusting our pipeline as the source of record for its own underwriting. That is not a favour, and it was not extended casually. It is the consequence of the verification work this series has been describing since Cerberus: deterministic gates, one normalised schema, provenance we can answer for. Fifty lenders re-verifying the same account was always the market admitting it trusted nobody. This is what the alternative looks like.
What changes for an applicant?
Three things, all in the same direction:
- Fewer steps: connect your bank once, at the start. No lender-by-lender reauthorisation, no second app-switching ceremony
- Faster decisions: receiving lenders start underwriting from verified data immediately, instead of waiting for you to complete their connection flow
- Same control: checking your options remains a soft search, consent is scoped to the lenders your application actually goes to, and you can revoke it whenever you like
What does not change is the deal I set out last week: the feed is sharp, and it does not negotiate. Sharing it onward makes the process faster in both directions, including for a decline. We think that trade was worth taking when the audience was our own matching engine, and it is worth taking now that the audience includes the lender who funds you.
Where does this go next?
More of the panel. Two lenders is a beginning, not a destination, and the pipeline was built so that adding a receiving lender is configuration, not a project. The order in which the rest arrive will depend on each lender’s own integration appetite, which varies for the same reason lender credit policies vary: they are different businesses with different machinery behind the door. When the list grows, this post and the one before it will grow with it.
If you run a business and want the one-connection version of applying, it is live today: start an application through Fundably and connect your bank when prompted. If you are a platform or lender and this architecture is the kind of thing you want to plug into rather than rebuild, our embedded lending pages describe the other side of the same pipeline.
