The FCA's Open Finance Vision for SME Lending Is Already Here, We Built It

In summer 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority published its Open Finance Sprint 2025 Outcomes Report. The document outlines an ambitious vision for how UK financial services should operate by 2030: verified data flowing seamlessly between systems, intelligent technology matching businesses with the right funding, and streamlined processes that eliminate the friction that has plagued commercial finance for decades.

As someone who spent ten years as a commercial finance broker before founding FundingSearch.com, I found myself nodding along to almost every page. Not because the ideas were new to me—but because we've already built them.

The FCA's "Vision 2030" isn't a distant aspiration for FundingSearch.com. It's our current product roadmap, largely delivered.

The Problem the Financial Conduct Authority Wants to Solve

The Open Finance Sprint brought together over 110 stakeholders—regulators, financial institutions, fintech companies, and technology providers—to address fundamental problems in how financial services operate, and that work now feeds into the FCA’s open finance roadmap published on April 14, 2026. For SME finance specifically, the report identifies issues that anyone working in commercial lending will recognise immediately.

The current system is broken. Businesses seeking funding face a labyrinthine process of applications, document gathering, and waiting. Brokers spend countless hours researching which lenders might be suitable for a particular deal, only to discover that criteria have changed or appetites have shifted. Lenders receive applications that don't match their requirements, wasting underwriter time and creating frustration on all sides. Adoption is also slowed by consumer data-sharing concerns, business uncertainty over implementation costs, and fragmented regulatory oversight.

The FCA report puts numbers to what those of us in the industry have long known: there's massive inefficiency in how SMEs access finance, and that inefficiency has real economic consequences. When businesses can't access funding quickly and efficiently, they delay investments, miss opportunities, and sometimes fail entirely. This is also how open finance moves beyond open banking by making wider financial data usable across more products and services.

The regulator's proposed solution centres on what they call the "foundational elements" of open finance: standardised data, verified information, intelligent matching, and streamlined processes. The FCA’s vision for open finance prioritises early use cases in mortgages and SME lending, giving the open finance roadmap a practical starting point as policy develops, and illustrates just how quickly fintech is reshaping commercial finance in the UK. They even coined a term for the technology that could deliver this—a "Financial Recommendation Intelligence Decision Agent" (FRIDA) that would assess business performance, match companies with affordable credit, and manage the lending process intelligently.

When I read that description, I had to smile. That's not a concept for 2030. That's what FundingSearch.com does today.

What "Verified Financial Data" Actually Means in Open Finance

One of the FCA's core priorities is establishing trusted, verified financial data as the foundation of open finance. The report specifically identifies "invoicing, accounting software data and company structures" as essential key data sets for SME empowerment.

This is precisely why we built direct integrations with Xero and Sage into our commercial finance broker software from the beginning. When a broker uses our platform, they're not relying on self-reported figures or outdated spreadsheets. They're working with live profit and loss statements, real-time balance sheets, and current cash flow data pulled directly from the business's accounting system. Robust consent management frameworks are essential for this kind of financial data sharing.

The difference this makes is profound. Lenders receive applications backed by verified numbers they can trust, and unlocking high quality data can also support early vulnerability detection and better consumer outcomes. Brokers can have confident conversations with clients based on accurate data. And businesses get faster decisions because there's no back-and-forth over financial documentation, with high quality data improving speed and consistency.

The FCA talks about this as a future state. For FundingSearch.com users, it's been the present for some time.

Intelligent Matching: From 20 Hours to 20 Minutes

The report describes a future where technology "assesses business performance and matches with affordable credit." This is the core of what FundingSearch.com delivers through our intelligent lender matching system, using real time transaction data rather than static credit reports.

In traditional commercial finance broking, researching suitable lenders for a single deal can take 20 hours or more. You're cross-referencing criteria across dozens of lenders, checking current appetites, considering sector restrictions, evaluating security requirements—all manually. It's exhausting, error-prone, and fundamentally inefficient.

Our platform transforms this process entirely. Upload a business profile, and within minutes you receive a ranked list of suitable lenders with match probability scores and clear reasoning for each recommendation. The algorithm considers hundreds of data points across our lender panel, weighted against the specific characteristics of each deal, powering a digital SME lending deal-origination experience. That helps businesses submit faster loan applications and better access credit.

The time savings alone would justify the platform. But there's a deeper benefit: better outcomes. When brokers can instantly see which lenders are most likely to approve a deal, they make better recommendations to clients. Applications go to the right places. Approval rates increase. Better matching can also reduce rejection rates and increase pricing pressure in SME lending. Everyone wins.

The FCA envisions this kind of intelligent matching as central to the future of SME finance. We've already proven it works. These are the kinds of improvements the FCA believes can deliver benefits, with significant benefits including helping address £570 million in unmet SME lending demand and £570 million a year in lender savings.

Streamlined Applications: The End of Repetitive Form-Filling

Anyone who has completed commercial finance applications knows the frustration of entering the same information repeatedly across different lender portals. It's tedious, time-consuming, and introduces errors every time data is re-keyed, even if scaling this model across the market still requires shared infrastructure and solving technical barriers such as latency.

The FCA report calls for "reduced friction" in financial services—systems that eliminate unnecessary steps and make processes flow naturally. This is exactly what our master application system delivers.

With FundingSearch.com, brokers complete one comprehensive application that then feeds into multiple lender-specific forms automatically, turning the process into a streamlined loan origination marketplace for SME finance. Our smart field mapping uses reusable data packages to handle the translation between different lender requirements, saving an estimated 80% of application completion time.

Combined with our Companies House auto-lookup for instant business verification, we've created exactly the streamlined experience the FCA describes. Information flows where it needs to go, verified at source, without the manual re-entry that wastes everyone's time. At full adoption, this kind of automation is expected to deliver benefits at scale, with business savings estimated at £3.8 billion annually.

The February 2026 TechSprint: Shaping What Comes Next

The FCA hasn't just published a report and walked away. They've announced concrete next steps, including an SME Finance TechSprint scheduled for February 2026 as part of their new Smart Data Accelerator programme, which sits within a wider delivery plan for the future framework for open finance. The FCA’s roadmap targets open finance services by 2029/2030.

FundingSearch.com will be participating. We want to be at the table as the regulatory framework for open finance takes shape—not reacting to rules after they're written, but contributing our practical experience to inform policy development alongside bodies such as Innovate Finance. The FCA plans to engage with industry and HM Treasury in 2027 to design the long term regulatory framework. This kind of support collaboration can lower barriers to entry for new firms, especially in a cross-regulator environment also shaped by the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum.

There's something valuable about bringing a broker's perspective to these conversations. The FCA can commission research and consult stakeholders, but there's no substitute for having built and operated the systems they're describing. We know what works because we've tested it with real brokers, real lenders, and real SME clients.

The report also mentions Project Aperta, an international collaboration on open finance interoperability with SME finance as an initial use case. This aligns directly with our expansion roadmap, which includes Ireland, Australia, and Canada—markets with similar commercial finance structures where our approach can be adapted, and it also fits the broader work of developing smart data schemes that underpin the smart data future.

Beyond Compliance: Building for Where the Market Is Going with Smart Data Schemes

There's a temptation in financial services to treat regulatory developments reactively—wait for the rules, then scramble to comply. We've taken the opposite approach at FundingSearch.com.

When we designed the platform, we weren't thinking about minimum compliance. We were thinking about what brokers and lenders actually need to work more effectively, closing the long-standing technology gap between mortgage advisers and commercial finance brokers that the FCA’s Open Finance work has exposed and that our finance broker software to rival mortgage advisers is built to address. That matters because consumer duty and consumer protection mean the market cannot treat open finance as a simple compliance exercise. It turns out that building genuinely useful technology often anticipates where regulation will eventually go.

The FCA's open finance agenda isn't arbitrary. It's driven by real problems in how financial services operate—problems that create friction for businesses, inefficiency for providers, and ultimately drag on economic growth. That direction also matters for medium-sized enterprises and smaller SMEs, where better data sharing can improve access to funding. More broadly, financial services occupy a central role in smart data schemes, so open finance develops as part of a wider regulatory direction. When you solve those problems properly, you naturally align with regulatory direction. Unlocking high quality data only works if it secures consumer trust through proportionate safeguards.

This gives us confidence about the future. As open finance frameworks develop and data-sharing requirements expand, FundingSearch.com is already positioned to meet them, with our press kit outlining our open finance strategy and market role. We're not playing catch-up; we're helping define where the industry goes next.

What This Means for Brokers and Lenders

If you're a commercial finance broker still researching lenders manually, still re-keying application data across multiple portals, still working with self-reported client financials—the FCA's report should be a wake-up call to adopt purpose-built commercial finance broker software.

The regulator has signalled clearly that this is where the industry is heading. Open finance isn't a theoretical concept; it's becoming the expected standard, building on the foundations established by open banking. Brokers who adopt these capabilities now will have significant advantages over those who wait.

For lenders, the message is equally clear. The future involves receiving pre-qualified applications backed by verified financial data through standardised channels, helping unlock open finance competition beyond incumbent distribution models. Lenders who engage with finance broker software that streamlines broker workflows end-to-end are already experiencing the benefits: better-matched applications, reduced due diligence time, and faster decisions. Participating firms and lenders that plug into these models also benefit from new technologies that make decisions faster and more accurate. Leadership from groups such as Open Banking Limited also shows how shared data ecosystems can mature into open finance.

The commercial finance industry is changing. The FCA has now made explicit what many of us have long believed: technology-enabled, data-driven lending isn't just more efficient—it's essential for supporting UK business growth.

The Future Is Already Here

When I left my broking career to build FundingSearch.com, plenty of people thought I was taking a risk. Why leave something that worked to build something unproven?

My answer was always the same: because the problems were too obvious and the solutions too clear. The commercial finance industry was operating on outdated technology, and everyone was paying the price—brokers in wasted hours, lenders in mismatched applications, businesses in delayed funding, especially in time-sensitive areas like bridging loan workflows between brokers and lenders.

Reading the FCA's Open Finance Sprint report felt like vindication. Not because we needed external validation, but because it confirms the industry is finally ready for the change we've been building towards, with the FCA's discussion paper and first scheme showing the market is moving from vision into implementation.

The FCA describes their vision as "2030." For brokers and lenders using FundingSearch.com, it's available now as a business and commercial lending platform that connects SMEs with multiple UK lenders.

FundingSearch.com is the intelligent matching platform for UK commercial finance. To see how verified data integration and intelligent lender matching can transform your broking business, contact Phillip Evans at [email protected] or visit www.fundingsearch.com, with progress also depending on enabling agreement across industry and regulators.