Apple has bought the U.K. open banking startup Credit Kudos, for about $150 million a report said Wednesday (March 23).

The deal closed earlier this week.

Credit Kudos’ services offer insights and scores on loan applicants drawn from bank data, particularly transaction and loan outcome data. It’s sourced from the U.K.’s open banking framework. The application programming interface (API) offers lenders better decision making, less risk and more acceptance rates.

The report from The Block news site noted that Credit Kudos last raised money at the height of the pandemic, in April 2020. Then it was able to nail down £5 million, or $6.5 million.

That round was led by AlbionVC, with TriplePoint Capital, Plug and Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, Entrepreneur First and several angel backers.

Credit Kudos was founded in 2015 by Freddy Kelly and Matt Schofield. It’s one of many big European open banking acquisitions in the last year. However this is the first one to be subsumed by a tech giant of Apple’s size.

The report notes that there’s no indication what Apple has planned for Credit Kudos.

See also: Atom Bank, Credit Kudos Team On SMB Loans

Credit Kudos teamed with Atom Bank last year to add open data capabilities for business loan affordability assessments, PYMNTS wrote.

The goal is to deliver over £1 billion in lending in the next two years.

Atom Bank plans to use Credit Kudos’ categorization and risk insights to automate underwriting, which will allow faster decision making.

In addition, Atom Bank will now be able to instantly verify income and know what credit repayments a smaller business can afford, and will gain the ability to offer loans to smaller and younger businesses.

NEW PYMNTS DATA: 57% OF CONSUMERS PREFER ADVANCED ID VERIFICATION AFTER TRYING IT

About:Fifty-seven percent of consumers who’ve used advanced ID verification methods such as voice recognition when contacting customer service say they’d do it again. The Consumer Authentication Experiences report, surveyed nearly 3,800 U.S. consumers to learn how offering innovative verification experiences is helping businesses deliver superior customer service across all channels.

Growth in new cross-border ventures has made it more critical than ever for financial institutions (FIs) and corporations to streamline business-to-business (B2B)...

Most U.S. and Canadian firms are aware of the transformative impact that third-party providers can bring to their working capital and are...

Coincheck this week became the 10th cryptocurrency firm to agree to a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) since...

You have successfully joined our subscriber list.

© 2022 What’s Next Media and Analytics™