Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF)

In 2019, iwoca was awarded £10 million from the Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF), the fund was administered and overseen by the Independent Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR). The funding was one of four £10 million Pool C grants awarded with the aim of helping businesses improve lending or payment services to SMEs across the UK.

Our Public Commitments and Progress

As part of the award process, all companies agreed to Public Commitments. We’ve already achieved a number of commitments, whilst continuing to work on each project so that we can support as many SME customers as possible. Our commitments below:

Serve a wider range of SME needs by introducing a new loan product that does not require a personal guarantee

We have successfully achieved our commitment to offer a new loan product that requires no or only a limited personal guarantee and we exceeded our public commitment aim to originate over £250 million by the end of 2023.

Launch iwocapay, a better alternative to factoring for small businesses

After successfully launching our iwocaPay product to market by Q2 2020, we further committed to processing over 40,000 transactions through the product by the end of 2025. As of Q4 2023, we had processed nearly 30,000 through iwocaPay and fully expect to achieve this commitment during 2024, with over 50,000 transactions forecast by the end of 2024.

Co-develop customised credit products with xero, the uk’s leading SME online accounting software platform

This commitment was successfully met in Q4 2021 when we went live with a high quality integration that made iwoca finance available to Xero users from within the Xero interface. iwocaPay continues to have a dedicated plugin integration with Xero that allows bill payers to pay their supplier, who uses Xero, instantly or in instalments.

Launch OpenLending to facilitate the expansion of SME financing solutions through the entire ecosystem

We successfully achieved part of this commitment, by onboarding 25 new partners through our OpenLending integration by the end of 2023. We also further committed to originate at least £400m in loan issuance through OpenLending by the end of 2025. By the end of 2023 we had originated close to £200m through OpenLending and given our current origination run rate, we are very confident that we will reach the £400m origination target before the end of 2025.

Decentralise to better support our geographically diverse customer base

As part of this commitment, we successfully set up a regional office in Leeds and we are very close to achieving our commitment of hiring at least 50 staff into new roles by 2023. By the end of 2023, we had hired a total of 49 and we fully expect to achieve and surpass this commitment target of 50 new commitment-related hires during Q1 2024.

Match BCR grant with at least £13 million of our own funds

We successfully met this commitment during Q2 2023 to invest an additional £13m of our own funds, in addition to the £10m CIF grant received.