After partnering for nine months, NIBC Bank and OakNorth sign five-year commercial agreement

OakNorth, the next-generation credit platform, has today announced the signing of a comprehensive five-year commercial agreement with NIBC Bank N.V., the Dutch bank that offers corporate and retail banking products and services.

The platform will help NIBC enhance its efficiency and data-based insights with regards to credit analysis and monitoring, thus enabling the bank to even better serve its clients and position itself for the future. The partnership will see a large portion of NIBC’s existing corporate loan book onboarded to the platform. OakNorth will also assist the bank in exploring new possibilities in its lending to medium-sized businesses. This initiative will be supported via the OakNorth Academy – a training programme exclusively available to OakNorth clients for their relationship managers and credit officers. NIBC will learn from OakNorth’s success with small and medium-sized lending in the UK via OakNorth Bank.

OakNorth allows financial institutions to dramatically improve and accelerate their credit decisioning and monitoring capabilities and deliver bespoke solutions that meet clients’ needs. Rather than purely relying on backward-looking data sourced from the borrower, and scenario analysis based on standard haircuts, the platform will leverage machine learning to bring in much richer internal and third-party data sets that enhance the credit analysis.

Paulus de Wilt, CEO of NIBC Bank, commented: “With the strengthening of our partnership with OakNorth that started with a minority investment in September 2018, NIBC will be able to leverage the OakNorth platform to enhance efficiency in the credit monitoring process with richer data, thus enabling us to even better serve our mid-market clients on their decisive moments. This partnership also enables us to strengthen our tech-based approach and better position us for the future.”

Rishi Khosla, co-founder of OakNorth, continued: “In NIBC, we’ve found a committed partner who shares our vision to fix small and medium-sized business lending in this market. After nine months of working together, NIBC has now decided to enter a five-year commercial agreement with us which is testament to the positive impact they can see the technology having on their commercial lending business going forward. We look forward to further strengthening our relationship with the bank and helping medium-sized businesses secure debt finance solutions tailored to their needs.”