Groov Raises £1.5M to Build the Lending Analytics API That Fintechs Actually Need

Groov, a UK fintech infrastructure company, has raised £1.5 million from Scale-up EIS Fund and Aperture Ventures to develop its API for automated lending analytics. The company is building the data infrastructure layer that enables fintech lenders, challenger banks, and embedded lending platforms to make faster, more accurate, and more inclusively designed lending decisions — by providing access to the customer spending data, affordability signals, and credit analytics tools that sophisticated credit risk models require but that many lenders struggle to access and process efficiently.

The UK consumer lending market has been transformed by the emergence of open banking, which gives regulated fintechs the ability to access a customer's bank transaction data with their consent. This creates the technical foundation for a new generation of lending decisions based on real income, spending, and cashflow patterns rather than on the thin proxy signals that conventional credit scoring relies on. A lending decision based on three months of actual bank transaction data tells a fundamentally more accurate story about a borrower's ability to repay than a credit score derived from historical credit file data that may be months old, incomplete, or missing entirely for thin-file customers who have not previously accessed mainstream credit.

The challenge is that building the data engineering, analytics, and machine learning infrastructure to exploit open banking data effectively requires substantial technical investment that most lending teams are not staffed to make. Groov addresses this by providing the capability as an API: lenders can integrate Groov's endpoints into their decisioning workflows and receive structured, analytics-ready outputs — income verification, affordability assessments, spending categorisation, cash flow metrics — derived from the raw transaction data, without needing to build the data pipeline infrastructure themselves. This allows lenders of all sizes to access sophisticated, real-time analytics without the development overhead, and to make lending decisions that are faster, more accurate, and more inclusive of borrowers who are creditworthy but poorly served by conventional scoring.

The funding will be used to develop the API's analytical capabilities, build open banking integrations, and grow the commercial pipeline among UK lending platforms and challenger banks.

Sources

• Crunchbase — Groov company profile