Lending Works chief executive Nick Harding said lenders need to innovate quickly during the pandemic and look into other sources of credit data such as open banks.

He said Lending Works borrowers representing around 8% of the platform’s portfolio opted for a deferral during the height of the crisis, but that figure is now down to almost half. Harding said businesses must adapt quickly to survive Covid-19.

Read more: More than 2 million consumers now use open banking

“It will be a long crisis and the aftermath will always lag behind the reality of what is happening in society and this is an example of why open banking can be very powerful,” he said. reported to LendIt Fintech Europe 2020 last month.

“We are at the end of the start of payment deferrals and I think the next 12 months will be very difficult for companies that cannot innovate quickly or look at other sources of credit data.

“And the big banks will have a lot of problems, they have traditionally been slow to adapt.”

Harding’s peer-to-peer consumer lending platform already uses open banking – the data sharing initiative which obliges large banks to share anonymized customer data with authorized third parties.

“Open banking will be adopted much faster, and significantly more businesses will use it because of Covid-19 and customers will then be more comfortable with it,” Harding said at the conference. .

“More of our major partners have adopted or are in the process of adopting open banking.”

The loan of works was acquired by alternative investment manager Intriva Capital in July and Harding said the company would invest significant resources in the lender.

“You have to try to take the positive things out of any situation and we have certainly been able to do that,” he said.

“We’re building products on open banking and overall it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s been a good crisis for us and we’re ending the year better than how we started, which is enough. unbelievable.