The AltFi view on partnerships: It’s a fintech love-in

Weekly Leader

Gone are the days of fintech vs fintech.

Today, if there’s one thing fintechs love to do, it’s team up with each other, and over the past year, we’ve seen some of the most well-known fintechs do just that.

Last week we saw open banking fintech Tink join forces with investment platform Wealthify, to transform the way the latter’s customers top-up their accounts.

Casting our minds back even further to the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, we saw two of the most prominent SME lenders team-up.

Starling Bank provided listed alternative lender Funding Circle with a pot of cash to the tune of £300m, to help the fintech bolster its small business lending under the (now-defunct) Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).

Funding Circle, not one to shy away from collaboration, also teamed up with Durham-based Atom Bank last week.

The digital bank is following in Starling’s footsteps and providing the listed lender with a £300m lending pot to help it dish out loans under both the Recovery Loan Scheme and Funding Circle’s own loan products.

And, as if fintech’s web couldn’t get any more intertwined, Starling Bank also built a partnership with the UK’s first peer-to-peer platform Zopa.

Last February, AltFiexclusively revealed that the two fintech heavyweights were to team up, with Starling funding loans originated through Zopa’s platform with its customer deposits.

This notion of working together for the benefit of consumers is a relatively new one for the financial world. We can’t really imagine NatWest and HSBC teaming up to help the nation’s SMEs.

In fact, a recent survey from French consultancy firm Capgemini and non-profit financial organisation Efma found that more than half of executives think that fintech has encouraged collaboration within the financial industry. 

These game-changing, customer-focused partnerships are proving a huge success, playing to the strengths of fintech by working together, not against each other.

The AltFi Leader is a new weekly view for 2021 from our editorial team. We’d love to hear your ideas, thoughts, feedback and constructive criticism: editorial@altfi.com