Forward Advances, a UK revenue-based financing solution for e-commerce and SaaS businesses, has partnered with Salt Edge, a leader in offering open banking solutions, to get instant access to aggregated bank data that allows them to make better lending decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed consumer behavior to digital channels and the shifts are likely to stick post-pandemic. While many companies are challenged to survive in the short-term, the pandemic presented an opportunity to businesses transacting online. Such conditions boosted the demand for flexible and digital alternatives to traditional funding arrangements. And the solution came quickly. Forward Advances offers revenue-based financing (RBF) solutions – a simple non-dilutive funding approach for eCommerce and SaaS businesses. Paired with Salt Edge’s data aggregation and business transaction categorisation tools, RBF accelerates the whole lending process, enhancing security and affordability.

Forward Advances, launched by the venture capital firm Forward Partners, supports a wider set of fast-growing e-commerce and SaaS businesses, providing revenue-generating short-term cash injections to fund growth activities. Salt Edge Partner Program helps Forward Advances to understand their customers’ businesses quickly, offering immediate access to the required data aggregated from major UK banks, without having their own AISP licence. Now the applicant’s business performance can be verified immediately, streamlining the process of making a lending decision from several days to just a few hours.

To get a 360-degree view of a businesses’ financial situation and behaviour, and to make calculated funding decisions, Forward Advances will use data enrichment tools for business transaction categorisation and financial insights.

Hasam Silva, Managing Director at Forward Advances, said: "Salt Edge data-driven open banking toolkit helps Forward Advances provide our customers with a better experience and deploy much needed capital to small businesses so they can concentrate on growing. Salt Edge’s solution stood out with the business categorisation offering that is not supported by most open banking providers."

Vladimir Pintea, Head of Open Banking Gateway at Salt Edge, comments: "Partnering with Forward Advances we feel a special responsibility and honor to support and even accelerate businesses’ development by bypassing complex eligibility checks and removing exhausting bureaucratic procedures in the process of acquiring additional funding. Using Salt Edge’s open banking technology, Forward Advances obtains deep and real-time insights that allow them to understand their customers’ businesses quickly."