Manchester fintech Crediflow AI raises £1.5m to automate business loan assessment

Crediflow AI, a Manchester fintech that works with banks and specialist lenders, has raised £1.5 million to automate the manual tasks involved in preparing and assessing business loans.

That workload restricts the number of deals lenders can take on and makes smaller loans to SMEs costly to underwrite.

Crediflow’s platform gathers the information credit teams currently collect and process by hand, such as bank transactions, financial statements and borrower documents, and converts it into structured credit analysis.

AI handles much of a process that is usually spread across spreadsheets, PDFs, emails and other unconnected systems. Pulling this data together by hand can take up to several days. Crediflow says its platform cuts that to between 10 and 30 minutes, freeing credit teams to focus on critical tasks.

In practice, the platform extracts and standardises the figures in a borrower’s accounts, a process known in the industry as financial spreading. It also analyses cash flow and writes the credit committee memo a lender needs to approve a loan, formatted to each customer’s preference.

Hundreds of credit professionals in the UK, Europe and the US already use the platform, at lenders ranging from specialists like AddWorking Capital to Iveco Capital, a global captive finance provider.

Investors and plans

NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance led the round. It is managed by PXN Ventures within NPIF II, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II. Haatch and angel investors also took part.

The money will speed up development of the platform, fund engineering and product hires and help Crediflow take on more banks and specialist lenders.

The company also plans to extend automation across the whole loan lifecycle, with workflows tailored to the credit policies and processes of each lender. By combining origination, underwriting and monitoring, it aims to cut duplicated work and allow lenders to grow their loan books without a matching rise in administrative costs.

Last year Crediflow was among eight businesses backed by PXN’s PraeSeed programme, which runs for 12 weeks in cohorts and is delivered in partnership with NPIF II and the British Business Bank to help early-stage companies scale.

Founder’s background

Chief executive Drey Kenfack set up Crediflow after seeing at first hand how manual processes hold back lenders’ growth. He has spent more than a decade in commercial lending and private credit, with senior credit roles at DF Capital Bank, Ford Credit Bank and Advance Global Capital.

Kenfack said: “Growing a loan book takes more than finding borrowers and having capital available. You need the capacity to assess those businesses, get decisions through approval and stay on top of risk once the money is out the door.

“When every transaction requires hours of manual preparation, it affects how much business a lender can take on and which deals are worth pursuing. We built Crediflow to bring that workload down and give credit teams more time to understand the borrower and structure the financing.”

PXN Ventures senior investment associate Joe Ball said granting commercial finance was often a largely manual and inefficient process that slowed lending decisions. “By automating this area of the sector, Drey and the Crediflow AI team are not just supporting lenders but also removing barriers for companies that need funding to grow,” he said.

“The best B2B founders build the product they wished they’d had in their last job,” said Jonathan Keeling, partner at Haatch. “With live customers across the UK, Europe and the US, the team has the traction to scale quickly, and we’re proud to support them on that journey.”