Lloyds taps $160bn fintech giant to boost small business tech
Lloyds Bank has sealed a partnership with a $160bn (£119bn) fintech giant to ramp up its payments tech for small-business clients.
The blue-chip banking giant has agreed a tie-up with Stripe that will see Lloyds leverage the fintech’s payment infrastructure to provide a suite of tools for its small-business customers.
The new offering, named Lloyds Accept, aims to get merchants set up and trading almost instantly, with a sign-up time of just a few minutes.
Amanda Murphy, chief executive of Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking, said: “Businesses need simple, flexible payment solutions so they can focus on growing and serving their customers.”
Top banking giants have ceded some of their small-business market share to challengers over the last decade, with British Business Bank data showing the latter account for around 60 per cent of total lending.
Lloyds has around 1m business banking customers and has laid out plans to make £35bn of new finance available to companies operating in the UK in the year ahead. Just shy of £10bn of this is targeted at small- and medium-sized enterprises.
Figures from EY earlier this year forecast that UK bank-to-business lending growth would halve this year as companies feel the pinch of changing economic conditions.
The partnership with Stripe marks the latest tie-up from a traditional banking giant and a fast-growing challenger as high street lenders look to defend their turf against digital-native rivals.
Lloyds snapped up Apple Pay challenger Curve last year in a bid to boost its digital offering against the challenger threat.
Other moves have seen Barclays snap up personal loans fintech Best Egg in a bid to beef up its loans package for investment bank clients.
Stripe – which was valued at $159bn after a secondary share sale earlier this year – has emerged as one of the most valuable fintech companies in recent decades.
The firm provides payment processing tools that enable websites, apps and platforms to accept the likes of credit cards and mobile wallets.
The software-as-a-service offering has become a key battleground for the next era of digital banking as traditional banks look to offload legacy systems and fintechs take advantage of their tech stack.
Starling’s infrastructure arm Engine signed Tangerine Bank – one of the “Big 5” banks in Canada boasting $1.4trn in assets- as a customer at the beginning of November, marking the first of its clients that is bigger than Starling’s bank.