Artesian is offering free access for its subscribers to its online service to pre-screen loan applications and triage lending enquiries.

In the weeks since the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) opened, around 300,000 businesses made informal application enquiries. Recent figures suggest that nearly 30,000 applications have now been formally received but just 6,000 loans have been approved, with delay caused by the need to apply eligibility and lending criteria to applications before front line teams get involved. Research suggests that demand for CBILS (as well as the scheme for larger businesses, CLBILS) could reach over 1.1 million applications, meaning banks will continue to feel the pressure for some time to come.

Each lending institution has responded with different ways to register applications, usually by way of an online portal, which applies the government and basic bank lending criteria to the SME applying for support. Artesian’s answer is to expedite the application approval process with an advanced triaging capability that gathers the data and information required to process the loan in advance of the Relationship Managers involvement.

Artesian already works with many of the UK’s top banks including RBS, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays and Nationwide and some have already begun to realise the benefits of Artesian’s Risk and Compliance Hub (ARCH). Metro Bank was an early adopter of the ARCH service, using it to automate many of the risk and KYC processes to provide insights to the frontline of the commercial banking function.

ARCH is a SaaS solution enabling banks to carry out smart accelerated pre-screening on loan applications to quickly validate and prioritise resources on the most viable options. Utilising credit risk data and company financial data via APIs, and using a series of bank-approved decision rules, ARCH presents an immediate summarised view of risk, flagging any potential problems that may arise. Banks and lending providers can simply define their own parameters regarding acceptable risk thresholds and the service is ready to go. Typically, ARCH reduces time spent in the data-gathering phase of onboarding by 90%, meaning banks and lenders could take a big step towards keeping up with demand and clearing the current bottleneck in applications.

Andrew Yates, Co-Founder and CEO at Artesian announced the offer saying: “As a result of COVID-19, banks are working to provide liquidity solutions to British businesses on an unprecedented scale, but in the few weeks since Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the CBILS, banks have been in the spotlight and under pressure to get money to the hundreds of thousands of businesses that so desperately need it. We are trying to do our bit and play our part to support UK businesses, and the wider economy, by helping the Institutions that will make it happen. £3m and two years of investment in developing ARCH, which launched last year, means we have a ready to go solution, which can be deployed quickly to proactively assist banks and achieve the accelerated risk decisioning their customers need.”