Innovate UK Partner With DueDil to Accelerate Delivery of Coronavirus Loan Scheme

LONDON, June 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovate UK have partnered with DueDil to get funds to small businesses faster during the Covid-19 crisis.

In April the government announced £750m of support for those small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) that are most intensively involved in research and development (R&D).

The support package available through Innovate UK, the national innovation agency, was introduced to accelerate loan payments for new and existing customers to help them to continue their innovation projects that may have otherwise been halted or delayed due to the Covid-19 crisis.

Innovate UK will be working with company intelligence platform, DueDil, to deliver loans to businesses in need in record time. DueDil enables Innovate UK to accelerate the lending process by providing authoritative insights on over 4.5 million UK companies in real time, so the Innovate UK Loans Credit Team can quickly assess business suitability for loans and deliver fast decisions to SMEs.

DueDil and Innovate UK have worked together since 2018 when Innovate UK launched their Innovation Loans programme for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with highly innovative late stage projects. Innovate UK approached DueDil to help shape their credit decisioning process in order to assess loan applications at speed with authoritative insights.

This work set the stage for Innovate UK launching the recently announced government loan scheme to support existing and new Innovate UK award holders continue their innovation activities through the pandemic.

Justin Fitzpatrick, Co-founder and CEO of DueDil, commented:

"Innovate UK has a critical role in disbursing the £750m package for the UK's most research and development intensive small businesses. By enabling Innovate UK to quickly assess business suitability, we help speed up the evaluation process and reduce the time to fund. For many SMEs, having access to financial support during this time is crucial for their survival. It is also vital that we continue to promote small businesses and maintain the UK's position as a leading innovation hub during and beyond the Covid-19 crisis. We are glad to be playing our part."

Emily Hogg, Head of Lending & Investment Operations at Innovate UK, said:

"The data we are able to readily view in DueDil allows us to be confident in our due diligence checks when conducting background research on applicant companies. The amount of data DueDil manages to capture, all in one place, has really helped to speed up our processing time, enabling faster decisions and ultimately quicker disbursements to SMEs."

DueDil joins other external partners, PwC, Moody's Analytics and Early Metrics, to help Innovate UK deliver new systems and features, at pace and at scale, to facilitate the support package for innovative SMEs.

About DueDil

Founded in 2011, DueDil is a company intelligence platform that delivers insights on more than 50 million companies and the people behind them. Its Business Information Graph (B.I.G.) ingests billions of data points a day from authoritative sources and connect the dots to create insight that is accurate, comprehensive and unique. More than 400 clients rely on DueDil's technology as an end-to-end solution for go-to-market execution, compliant onboarding and risk monitoring, helping them empower decision making and accelerate growth.

In March 2020 DueDil was named RegTech Partner of the Year for the second year running at the British Banking Awards in recognition for its work transforming the digital customer journey for tens of thousands of UK SMEs. DueDil has a number of well-known clients, including Santander, Metro Bank, Aon and TSB Bank.