10x Banking & ezbob partner on UK SME lending launch

10x Banking and ezbob have partnered to offer banks a combined launch package for SME lending products, starting in the UK.

The agreement combines 10x Banking's core ledger system with ezbob's lending orchestration platform for small and medium-sized enterprise lending. The aim is to help banks bring SME lending products to market in weeks rather than months.

Under the partnership, ezbob will handle onboarding, application flows, credit decisioning and AI agents. 10x Banking will provide the core and ledger infrastructure used to define and operate the lending product, and to maintain the financial system of record.

Both companies are targeting a segment where many banks have digitised simpler retail services, such as current account opening and some personal loans, but have made slower progress in SME lending. They argue that the complexity of business lending, along with reliance on legacy systems, has made the customer journey harder to modernise.

For banks, the main pitch is that the integration is open rather than tied to a single closed software suite. That means lenders can connect specialist components and reuse them when adding further lending products, instead of building separate systems for each product line.

The SME focus comes as smaller businesses continue to dominate the UK corporate base. Government figures cited by the companies show SMEs account for 99.9% of all private businesses in the UK.

10x Banking is known for supplying banking technology to large financial institutions including Chase UK and Westpac. ezbob has worked with lenders including NatWest and Metro Bank, giving the partnership an established banking customer base rather than making it a purely new market entry.

The companies also pointed to operating data from ezbob's existing platform. According to the figures provided, lending products built on ezbob have gone live in as little as six weeks, more than 90% of applicants have completed an application in under five minutes, and 94% of approvals have been automated.

That performance matters because banks are under pressure to cut the cost and time involved in serving smaller business borrowers. SME lending often requires more complex underwriting, identity checks and data gathering than mainstream retail products, which can strain older banking platforms and fragmented workflows.

Digital gap

The partnership reflects a broader push across the banking sector to break up large technology projects into smaller integrated layers. Rather than replacing every internal system at once, banks have increasingly looked to combine core banking platforms, specialist product engines and digital journey tools to shorten delivery times.

In this case, 10x Banking is supplying the ledger and product layer, while ezbob is focused on the front-end and decisioning process. The companies say this should help lenders avoid creating a new silo each time they launch another lending product.

"Banks are too often asked to choose between a broad suite that is difficult to adapt and a collection of point solutions that never quite connect. Neither gets a lender to market quickly. Bringing our core and ledger together with a specialist origination platform gives them a faster, lower-risk route to market, and the flexibility to keep evolving it afterwards. SME lending is where customers can get the most value, which is why we are starting there," said Okan Ozaltin, Chief Product & Technology Officer at 10x Banking.

His comments reflect a long-running tension in bank technology procurement between buying one large platform and stitching together several niche providers. That debate has sharpened as lenders try to improve digital services for business customers without taking on the cost and disruption of a full core replacement.

ezbob framed the issue as one of customer journey design rather than internal process automation alone. It said its platform was built to digitise the lending journey itself, rather than simply move applications through old back-office systems.

"We built ezbob to digitise the lending journey itself, rather than automate an internal process on top of systems that were never designed for it. Pairing that with a tier-one bank-grade core means a lender can launch a complete SME product, automate decisions where policy allows, and reuse the same components to add further lending products instead of building a new silo each time," Yaron Shoshani, Chief Technology Officer at ezbob, said.

The partnership begins with SME lending in the UK, where banks and financial technology suppliers continue to compete on speed to launch, underwriting automation and the quality of digital application journeys. Products on ezbob's platform have gone live in as little as six weeks, according to the companies.