The FCA says SME access to finance is constrained less by regulation than by market friction, including complex applications, duplicated checks and limited awareness of suitable options. It has identified SME lending as a priority use case for open finance and is monitoring work on digital verification that could reduce repeated customer checks while maintaining financial-crime controls.
This is relevant to advisers handling commercial finance and self-employed mortgage clients. Better permissioned data sharing could improve income assessment, speed up evidence gathering and help match businesses to appropriate funding routes. However, firms adopting AI or open-finance tools should retain strong controls over data quality, customer consent, explainability, fraud detection and manual intervention—especially where automated decisions may disadvantage thin-file or irregular-income borrowers.