Supporting SMEs through the COVID-19 crisis

In line with our core mission to support SMEs navigate the financial system and access funding, we have recently added two new features to Credit Passport.

The first is a Liquidity shortfall calculator, to present businesses with scenarios on cost cutting and their resulting borrowing needs.
The second is a Credit Passport Pre-Crisis Credit Report that can be used to show a lender your company's credit quality at a point in time before the effects of Covid-19 had an impact.
Both of these tools are available on our free plan to all of our customers.
Furthermore we continue to work with lending partners that are part of the government CBIL scheme to assist lenders and businesses at this time.

Additionally we are constantly adding jargon free content and additional tools to our Learning Centre, and have now added a new section specifically for our growing set of Coronavirus business articles, in our Covid-19 Business Support Centre.

If you have a Credit Passport score of B or above, you are eligible to get a Credit Passport badge. This simple embed code shows your live Credit Passport score to all of your web visitors, setting your company apart from the competition and demonstrating that you are a reliable and stable business partner for your clients and suppliers.

A Credit Passport badge is available on an active plus plan and above.

It can be inserted into any website by cutting and pasting one line of code, in the same way you would add a YouTube video to a blog. It should only take your web designer a few minutes to do, and you can contact us for any assistance that you need getting it set up.

PSD2 is the acronym for the second ‘Payment Services Directive’, which took effect across the entire European Economic Area on the 13th January 2018.

There are two parts to PSD2. The part we are concerned with here at Credit Passport, is the part that is designed to give consumers more control of the data that their banks hold about them. The thinking behind it is that if you as a consumer of financial services make a request to your bank for the data they hold on you, they have to give it to you. This makes it easier to switch from one banking provider to another, and also to compare financial offers or to aggregate all of your banking relationships into one place.

The way it has been implemented across Europe is for the regulatory bodies, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (the FCA) in the UK to only allow trusted third parties to request this data on the behalf of individuals (or businesses). These regulated third parties are called Account Information Service Providers, or AISP’s for short.

We were one of the first 6 AISP’s in the UK. The company behind us is called CRIF Realtime Ltd. and you can see our authorisation here.

This means that when you ‘connect your bank accounts’ as part of the Credit Passport application process, we will transfer you to your banks website and you tell them (electronically) that you are happy for them to give us access to read your bank account transactions for a specific period of time. At no point in this process do we ever have direct access to your account or see your log in details. We also only have the ability to READ data, not to make payments or initiate transfers.

Every 90 days you will need to re-approve the connection request with your bank to keep your Credit Passport current.

The second part of PSD2 is to allow different regulated companies (Payment Service Providers, PSPs for short) to make direct payments from your bank account without a bank card in between. Only specific regulated companies can do this.

Open Banking is the new secure way to give providers like Credit Passport access to your financial information.

OpenBanking.org itself is the organisation in the UK set up by the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) to oversee the implementation of the European PSD2 directive on behalf of the UK government.

Unlike in other countries, in the UK a decision was made to standardise the way all banks provide the access to their accounts. OpenBanking.org sets out these standards, generates the secure certificates that are used to make a connection, and keeps the directory of the 64 regulated companies with permission to access accounts. You can view our entry here.

Every time a request for data is initiated, a lookup is made against this directory and it is only processed if there is an active and valid entry.

There are lots of detailed FAQs on the OpenBanklng website here.

Sometimes you may also hear about Open Banking in the press as a concept. This is because it has become the term that refers to the principle of sharing data for a more fair and open financial world.

Just as any accountant or financial adviser would, the only thing we need from you to create your Credit Passport, is for you to grant us a read-only to view of your main business bank account, which is done using Open Banking.

We also look up some additional data from companies house and other public information sources that list your filled company accounts.

We take your privacy very seriously. We do not share any of your data for marketing purposes at all. We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, who are responsible, amongst other things, for ensuring we have world class and robust technical and procedural infrastructure in place to provide financial services.

The way OpenBanking works, is at no point do we ever see or have access to your banking passwords. After you have told us who you bank with, we redirect you to your banks own website where you log in as you would as usual on their website or app. You approve the request for your bank to send us your account data.

All of our sites are fully encrypted using 256bit encryption, and triple checked by specialist security teams.

Once we have processed your transaction data, even our team cannot access it directly, and only an anonymised version of your account data is made available to our algorithm for continual improvement and data quality monitoring.

We currently work with most of the UKs biggest banks. If you bank with a different bank, please contact us to see if we can add it for you.

Under the PSD2 directive, all banks in the UK will have to allow Open Banking connections - so if your bank is not connected yet, it soon will be.