Banking and corporate specialists in the Bristol office of international law firm Osborne Clarke have advised fast-growing credit technology platform Fintern on its latest fundraising round, in which it secured £8m of new capital.
The investment round, led by international investment firm Hambro Perks, also included an equity investment from the London-based fintech firm’s primary debt provider Varengold Bank and, with a number of individual investors, took the company’s total capital raised to £40m. 
Fintern, which has a mission to expand access to affordable credit, offers the flexibility to manage loan repayments around customers’ personal needs with lower interest rates than the market.
It says that that while there is more data available today than ever before, most lenders still base their decisions on a credit scoring system developed in the 1950s, leaving more than 15m people in the UK facing unnecessarily high borrowing costs and unsuitable credit products. 
Instead, Fintern uses open banking to get a true picture of each applicant’s unique financial situation, then combines this data with several other sources to base its lending decisions on what someone can afford to borrow rather than relying on an incomplete snapshot of the past.
The firm plans to use the funds to bolster its UK presence, build out its team and launch its first B2B partnerships.
It aims to build a £1bn loan book in the UK over the next five years while using the experience gained from its own lending business to strengthen its B2B proposition.
Osborne Clarke’s team working on the deal – the latest in a string of fintech transactions completed by its Bristol office – consisted of banking and finance partner Tom Bussy, pictured, and corporate specialists James Taylor and Adam Turner.
Osborne Clarke’s international financial services sector team advises clients ranging from start-ups, scale-ups/growth businesses and fintech unicorns to challenger banks, payments, retail and consumer finance, platforms, large corporates and institutions as well as lenders, investors and industry bodies and regulators.
