Fresh off a partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, London-based credit-analysis firm OakNorth is developing new features around peer benchmarking and accounting software integrations. 

“We’re putting a very big investment into those things at the moment,” said Sean Hunter, chief information officer at OakNorth. “This problem of SME and mid-market lending is a real problem for the economy. This is globally. Obviously, COVID just accentuates that. Post-crisis, if we want the economy to rebuild, the engine of regrowth is going to be medium-sized and small businesses.”

OakNorth, which functions as a bank in the U.K. but white labels its technology to banks internationally, and Tokyo-based SMBC announced last month the bank would be using OakNorth’s technology and investing $30 million in the 5-year-old startup. Hunter said OakNorth aims to release the new features in the “next couple of quarters.”

OakNorth’s technology provides forward-looking breakdowns of borrowers’ financial situations, allowing lenders to intervene with borrowers before loans go bad. According to Hunter, accounting system integrations will allow OakNorth to pull more data on borrowers’ into its credit-analysis technology with the borrowers’ consent. The benchmarking tool, meanwhile, will use machine learning to suggest peers borrowers can observe to make sure their business is on track. OakNorth has analyzed more than $500 billion of loans this year, according to the company.

In June, PNC partnered with OakNorth to use the startup’s “COVID Vulnerability Rating” framework that helps banks predict credit health based on COVID-specific factors. The company also counts Customers Bank, Modern Bank and NIBC Bank as clients. OakNorth is cloud-hosted on Amazon Web Services. The startup also uses AWS’ Apache Kafka, a real-time data processing service.

According to Hunter, SMBC is using OakNorth for many of the same functions as PNC, namely providing data-driven insights into borrowers’ financial health. The $30 million investment from SMBC is a secondary round, meaning OakNorth hasn’t gained any new money. To date, the company has raised more than $1 billion in funding. Hunter, nevertheless, called the investment from the $2.1 trillion-asset bank a “big vote of confidence .”

According to Aurelie L’Hostis, senior analyst at Forrester Research, OakNorth’s technology helps banks make sense of unstructured data, a major challenge for banks. “COVID-19 and its economic fallout have invalidated the assumptions upon which segmentation, lending, risk and predictive models are based,” L’Hostis said. “Lenders can no longer address at-risk loans only after they become nonperforming. They need to be able to conduct portfolio diagnostics and assess borrowers’ capacity to repay their loans on an ongoing basis.”