A consortium led by Smarter Contracts has been selected by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to participate in its Smart Data Accelerator – SME Finance TechSprint. The project will explore the development of a portable and auditable Business Passport designed to remove friction from data sharing and unlock credit opportunities for micro and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Despite SMEs generating more than £2.8trillion for the UK economy each year, less than half of those applying for credit are successful. This high failure rate is often attributed to fragmented and incomplete credit data, which prevents lenders from gaining a complete picture of a business, its founders, or its potential. The problem is particularly acute for new or early-stage start-ups with thin credit files, where fragmented personal data is often the only proxy available for repayment assessment.
Smarter Contracts intends to solve this by introducing the portable credit passport: a reusable digital credential that fuses verified credit, financial, and alternative data into a single package. The passport is powered by the company’s patented Pulse Permissions Protocol and shared via the Pulse+ application.
Building a new standard for SME credit
The consortium brings together key players across the lending ecosystem, including: Creditsafe, Groov, Recap, and Factotum Group. Together, the group will design and test how verified, permissioned data can make SME lending faster, fairer, and simpler, ensuring control rests with the business via a single, unified application.
Creditsafe, a leading provider of business intelligence, will focus on identifying alternative and consent-based data sources that, when made accessible through Smart Data rails, could meaningfully improve credit outcomes for underserved businesses. The project seeks to prove that data currently difficult to access or share can provide lenders with a more complete picture of a business’s potential with the appropriate infrastructure and permissions.
- Factotum Group will contribute its expertise to the research components of the project.
- Groov, an orchestration platform for embedded lending, will provide access to SMEs and map typical lending pipelines that Smarter Contracts will need to integrate into.
- Recap, an embedded funding platform, will act as the lending partner, validating how the new passport performs during real underwriting journeys.
The collective project aims to identify precisely where the portable credit passport removes friction for borrowers, lenders, SMEs, and service providers alike.
Wayne Lloyd, founder and chief executive officer of Smarter Contracts, stated that the project unites every part of the SME lending ecosystem—from onboarding to funding—within a single framework programmatically governed by Pulse. “Together we’ll showcase how UK finance can evolve into something smarter, faster and truly governed by trust,” Lloyd added.
Jonathan Field, managing director of Recap, acknowledged that access to funding for SMEs remains far too difficult. He expressed anticipation for demonstrating how portable, verified data can dramatically reduce friction and help businesses secure funding faster and more fairly.
The project began on November 17, with participants set to showcase their solutions to the FCA on February 12, 2026.