AI Lending

UOB Expands Their 15-Minute Loan Approvals for SMEs with OctoRocket

With the signing of a memorandum of understanding, UOB will enable small businesses that use OctoRocket for at least six months to apply for financing directly on the platform itself. Instead of relying on a small business’ financial statements, the UOB will assess the applicant’s creditworthiness based on its transactional data on OctoRocket, using a credit assessment engine developed by Avatec.ai.

Using AI and machine learning, the engine gains insights into the applicant’s cashflow and day-to-day operations, which enables it to determine the applicant’s credit quality. UOB asserts that this allows the bank to bring the loan approval period from the average 2.5 days to just 15 minutes.

According to UOB, a small business would typically have to submit two years’ worth of financial statements and six months’ worth of bank statements when applying for financing. With their activity on OctoRocket automatically recorded, UOB wants to free small businesses from the time and effort of manually compiling these documents to focus instead on their business.

As a result, small businesses that are younger than two-years-old on the platform would be eligible for loans as well.

OctoRocket is a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform just launched in January. A joint venture of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and Y3 Technologies, it enables cross-border trade between suppliers and buyers from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

For now, OctoRocket helps 30 suppliers in the region’s packaged food industry to sell more than 600 types of food products such as snacks, instant noodles, canned food, sauces, condiments and beverages.

Featured image via UOB