However, it actually exposed a much bigger problem. Banks are unable to reliably assess the risk of lending to a small business at scale. The process is either very manual but expensive (relying on human underwriters) or automatic but overly simplistic (shoving small businesses into the same category as consumers and relying on personal credit scores).

The result was that viable small businesses were starved of the finance they needed to grow (eg by investing in stock, facilities etc) or struggled whenever they faced a cash flow constraint. iwoca aims to solve this problem and as a result drive sustainable economic growth.

To do this, we at iwoca built a cutting-edge platform to collect incredibly rich data on any business that applies for credit - everything from bank transactions to eBay feedback scores - which we can analyse in a systematic way. Most importantly, our platform allows us to combine automatic scoring with expert human input so it allows us to make fast, accurate decisions on even the most complex small businesses

We're proud to have already supported over 4,000 businesses with over £70m in funding and are seeing a 300% annual growth in loan issuance. However, we don't want to lose sight of the scale of the challenge. Small business lending is far below the levels it was pre-recession – 23% decrease in approved loans to small businesses from Q3 2011 to Q3 2015 according to the British Bankers Association – which equates to £556m less funds approved.

If iwoca is going to make a real impact we need to accelerate our growth even further. That's why we have a goal of lending to at least a million businesses across Europe within a decade. It defines our ambition, ensures we always build for scale and helps set our strategy. For example, we have increasingly been working with partners to help make this a reality.

Last year, we announced a major deal with Alibaba to offer trade finance to small businesses importing from China. In 2015, we launched an online broker platform and started to build quality relationships with a wide-range of financial brokers. We'll be putting even more focus on this in 2016.

Here at iwoca, which stands for instant working capital, we can lend small businesses up to £100,000 within a matter of hours. We are now one of the fastest growing credit providers in Europe and we operate across the UK, Germany, Spain and Poland. 

Attributed to Christoph Rieche, CEO and Co-Founder of iwoca.