Taking advantage of the opportunities of open banking, Banca AideXa has developed a business model that makes possible for micro, small and medium sized businesses to receive a loan proposal in just a few minutes and to have the amount credited to their bank account within 48 hours, without the need to sign or upload any paper documents.

Fast and easy landing: how is it possible?

Banca AideXa’s goal is to make the world of online financing efficient and cost effective for businesses. Those who are running business don’t have time to lose: they can’t spend hours sitting in a bank just to ask for a loan or wait weeks before the money is actually deposited in their account. Also, because a company often requires immediate liquidity to meet its investment needs.

Thanks to 100% digital on boarding and the support of a Business Banker, Banca AideXa is able to assist the entrepreneur via any channel and at any time.

Moreover, by exploiting the potential of data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies, it’s able to accurately assess the credit profile of a company in just a few seconds, going beyond “old” parameters such as the financial statements of a company that can’t be the only data point to evaluate a loan application.

To assess whether a company or professional is creditworthy, Banca AideXa instead analyses transactions in the bank statements of the last 12 months: information that is readily available to the entrepreneur in real time from their online banking.

PSD2 and Open Banking are two pillars of Banca AideXa

Open innovation strategies applied to the banking disclose new opportunities for businesses. What makes Banca AideXa’s service so unique and efficient is the use of open banking model, which grants financial service providers access to consumer financial data – with their consent – through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs).

Thanks to the 2015 European Directive on digital payments (so-called PSD2), in Italy in force since 2018, open banking has become an integral part of the digital transformation of the banking sector.

What is the main change? The Directive gives more power to consumers, who become owners of their data and can also grant access to third parties authorised by Supervisory Authorities. Companies thus have the opportunity to offer a range of new products and services based on this shared information.

In fact, open banking has opened up new horizons where FinTech and TPP (Third-Party Providers) can increasingly create and promote value-added services for the benefit of consumers or business partners.

Through open banking, when applying for a loan entrepreneurs can authorise Banca AideXa to access their current account information on a read-only basis simply by accessing their online banking. The balance, recurring payments and incoming and outgoing account transactions are read in an instant.

Thanks to PSD2, the process is secure because Banca AideXa does not store the login credentials, accesses the account only once and only for the time necessary to acquire the information needed. The benefits for customers are enormous and result in real-time savings with just a few clicks.

Big Data, AI & Machine Learning at the service of SMEs

Data drive the digital experience and the decisions made. Thanks to open banking and an extensive ecosystem of partners and information sources, Banca AideXa is able to reconstruct the history of companies, assessing their creditworthiness and alignment with the products offered.

For each application, Banca AideXa evaluates up to 10,000 different pieces of information, from financial statements to transactions of customers' bank accounts, not to mention news on the web and data relating to the specific industry.

These analyses are available thanks to an advanced big data platform, completely in the cloud, which can be accessed by data scientists to develop increasingly intricate machine-learning models. From an augmented intelligence perspective, insights and data are made available to humans, who remain at the centre of the credit assessment processes.

The insights developed by Banca AideXa are and will increasingly be made available to companies that will thus be able to self-assess their strengths and weaknesses to improve their competitiveness.

To learn more about our products, you can read this article.