OakNorth

In 2005, our co-founders, Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman, were looking for a working capital facility to support their growing business, Copal Partners, a financial research firm they’d founded three years previously. They approached numerous high-street banks and kept getting variations of the same response – “the computer says ‘No’”. Despite being a profitable business with strong cash flow and retained clients, none of the commercial banks were willing to lend to them. It was too small a ticket to offset the costs the bank would incur in doing a fundamental assessment of their business and structuring a finance facility for their needs. A few months later through one of their institutional client’s special situations desk, they managed to secure 100x the amount of debt for a dividend recap. So, an institutional division of a bank was able to support them, but the commercial lending part of the bank was not. This experience stuck with them. After they’d scaled Copal Partners to a 3,000-employee business and sold it to Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO) in 2014, they set out to address the funding gap they had experienced first-hand and empower the Missing Middle, through launching OakNorth. OakNorth’s (ON) Credit Intelligence Suite transforms commercial lending by helping banks build deeper relationships with their clients, open new, more profitable opportunities, whilst delivering credit decisions up to ten times faster than traditional models, with lower risk and greater efficiency. Credit Intelligence is a data-driven technology that gives lenders a forward-looking view of the borrower based on expansive and dynamic data sets and scenarios specific to that business, using automated, continuous analysis of multiple drivers across the business, its peer group and the wider economy. This provides an independent, consistent, detailed framework offering deep contextual insight that enables rapid underwriting, immediate stress-testing and more agile and targeted strategic lending. Built over five years by an engineering and credit science team of over 250 people, the ON Credit Intelligence Suite has propelled OakNorth Bank in the UK into the top 1% of banks in developed markets in terms of RORE and efficiency, enabling it to profitably manage a multi-billion-dollar commercial lending portfolio - benefits that banks across the world can now realize. In addition to OakNorth’s own bank in the UK, the software is also being deployed by banks around the world, including: SMBC, PNC Bank, Customers Bank, Old National Bank and Modern Bank in the US, and NIBC and OIMIO in Europe.