ICP // For Lenders

AI systems, built for lenders.

We are the AI engineering partner for UK and European lenders. SME finance, consumer credit, bridging, asset finance, invoice finance, BNPL, P2P. We speak Mambu, nCino, LendingWise, LendingMetrics, Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, TrueLayer, Plaid, GoCardless, Provenir, Zoral and Sumsub natively — and we ship AI systems your origination, servicing, collections, compliance and treasury teams can trust in production.

The lending business changed. iwoca wins in SME finance because its portal is nicer — not because its money is cheaper. Zopa retains consumer borrowers because the servicing experience is self-serve. LendInvest wins bridging because its broker portal actually works. The moat is no longer rate. The moat is the borrower and broker experience, the speed and defensibility of the credit decision, the intelligence of the servicing surface, and the maturity of the collections engine.

This is where we operate. KJ Capital is a small, senior AI engineering studio that works almost exclusively with financial firms. UK and EU lenders — regulated under FCA CONC, Consumer Duty, PRA CRR or the CBI equivalent — are our home turf. We know the loan management systems, the bureaus, the payment rails, the KYB vendors, the arrears counsel, and the exact places in your stack where AI moves a real number on cost-of-acquisition, cost-of-funds, arrears rate or servicing headcount.

Book the Lender Diagnostic See how we engage

The thesis

The moat is not rate. The moat is the experience.

iwoca lends to SMEs at rates that are, on paper, above the market. It wins because you can apply, decide, draw and service inside a portal that actually works. Zopa retains consumer borrowers because the servicing experience is self-serve. LendInvest wins bridging because the broker portal actually works. The lenders winning share in every UK vertical are winning on experience, not price.

And yet across most UK lenders — sub-iwoca in SME, sub-Zopa in consumer, sub-LendInvest in bridging — the borrower still can’t log in. Can’t see a statement. Can’t get a settlement quote. Can’t change a DD date. Can’t apply for a payment holiday without a phone call. The broker still uploads documents by email. The underwriter still assembles the case by hand. The collections team still calls after the missed payment instead of before.

Every one of those is an engineering problem. Every one of them is solvable with modern AI systems built above your existing LMS. And every one of them is a competitive lever your peers who ship it are already pulling.

Lender stack fluency

The lender stack we plug into

We are not a horizontal AI consultancy that learned about lending last week. We build against the systems your teams already use.

Loan management

Mambu
nCino
LendingWise
Sopra Cassiopae
Finastra
TCS BaNCS
in-house LMS

Credit & bureau

Experian
Equifax
TransUnion
ClearScore
CRIF
LendingMetrics
Provenir
Zoral

Open banking / KYC

TrueLayer
Plaid
Tink
Yapily
Sumsub
Ondato
Onfido
ComplyAdvantage

Payments

GoCardless
Bacs / BACSTEL-IP
Modulr
ClearBank
Currencycloud
Stripe / Adyen

CRM & Marketing

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud
HubSpot
Zendesk
Intercom
Braze
Iterable

Regulators

FCA (CONC)
Consumer Duty
PRA CRR
CBI (Ireland)
MFSA (Malta)
BaFin (Germany)

What we ship

Eight places we move a number for lenders.

COO · Head of Customer · CTO

Borrower portals & self-service

iwoca wins because you can log in, see everything, act on it, and never call. Most lenders can't. We build modern AI-first borrower portals — statements, redraw, settlement quotes, doc vault, mid-term changes, complaints — with a support copilot that answers 80% of tickets before they reach a human.

CRO · Head of Credit · Head of Data Science

AI credit decisioning

Credit decisioning is the single most defensible AI investment a lender makes. We build firm-specific scorecards that combine open banking, bureau, alt-data and application signals — with explainable adverse-action notices, live A/B champion-challenger, and full audit trail for the FCA and your risk committee.

CCO · Head of Origination · Head of Digital

Application & origination

Every abandoned application is an acquisition cost wasted. We build AI-native application flows that pull open-banking, run KYC/KYB across Sumsub/Onfido, extract documents automatically, decision in seconds and hand a fully-packaged case to your underwriter or straight to drawdown.

COO · Head of Servicing · Head of Payments

Servicing & payments

The average lender is spending £30–£80 per active loan per year on servicing. Most of that is repeat DD failures, mid-term changes, restructure requests and payment-date queries — every one of which is automatable. We build the servicing brain that turns the call centre into an exception desk.

Head of Collections · CRO · Head of Compliance

Collections & arrears

The best collections shop is the one that never has to collect. We build pre-arrears signal engines, Consumer Duty-safe outreach, forbearance and restructure workflows, and vulnerable-customer handling that FCA supervisors respect and roll rates rebel against.

CRO · Head of Fraud · Head of Underwriting

Fraud & first-party risk

Every basis point of undetected fraud is a basis point of loan pricing your good borrowers subsidise. We build fraud brains that combine identity, device, graph, behavioural and post-drawdown signals into a single defence — for consumer lenders, SME lenders, bridging shops and BNPL alike.

Head of Distribution · Head of Broker · COO

Broker & introducer portals

In bridging, development, asset finance, specialist consumer and BTL — the broker is your distribution. And most broker portals are DOS-era. We build the broker portal that packages cases, returns DIPs in minutes, tracks commission and quietly scores every introducer for quality.

CFO · Head of Treasury · CRO

Treasury & loan book intelligence

Most lender leadership teams cannot answer 'what is the true unit economics of the loans we originated in April, by channel, product and cohort' inside a quarter. We build the loan book intelligence layer that answers it inside a coffee.

How lenders engage us

Diagnostic → Build → Operator.

A productised path with fixed scope, fixed price, fixed duration. You always know what you’re getting and what it costs before you sign.

Step 01

Lender Diagnostic

£15k · 2 weeks

A senior AI architect embeds with your team for two weeks. Ships a written blueprint, a working proof-of-concept against your real loan-book data and a fixed-price roadmap for Build.

Step 02

AI Build

£95k–£300k · 8–14 weeks

Pick from eight productised builds: borrower portal, credit decisioning, origination, servicing, collections, fraud, broker portals, treasury intelligence.

Step 03

AI Operator

From £8k/mo

We continue as your fractional AI engineering team — owning the roadmap, shipping weekly, monitoring what we deployed, sitting in your standups.

Frequently asked

What lender teams ask us before signing.

Q01Do you work with SME lenders as well as consumer lenders?+

Yes. Our practice covers SME (unsecured, secured, invoice, asset), consumer (unsecured, guarantor, near-prime, subprime), bridging, development finance, motor and BNPL. The shape of the AI systems changes per product; the underlying architecture — a firm-owned borrower and broker experience, a defensible credit brain, a self-serve servicing layer and an FCA-compliant collections engine — is the same.

Q02Do you rip and replace our loan management system?+

No. Mambu, nCino, LendingWise, Sopra, Finastra, TCS BaNCS or an in-house LMS remains the system-of-record. AI systems sit above them — reading their data via API, writing back decisions and events, and exposing a modern borrower and broker surface. The LMS keeps running; the intelligence layer moves the numbers.

Q03How do you handle FCA CONC and Consumer Duty compliance?+

Architecturally, not as a bolt-on. Every KJ Capital lender build ships on the three-layer envelope — policy layer, retrieval scoped to approved sources, evaluations harness — with SM&CR-mapped accountability, vulnerable-customer signalling, adverse-action explainability, and an audit-logged reasoning trail for every automated decision. The compliance envelope is the accelerator, not the tax.

Q04How fast can you show a lender something real?+

The 2-week AI Diagnostic (£15k) produces a written blueprint, a working proof-of-concept against a slice of your real loan book and application data, and a fixed-price roadmap for the first Build. Most engagements close on a productised Build within 2–4 weeks of the Diagnostic ending.

Q05Who owns the IP and the models?+

You do. Every KJ Capital build ships to your infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP or on-prem), with your data staying in your tenancy, your model choices (frontier, open-weights or private) and full source-code delivery. We do not resell your data, we do not train on it, and we do not lock you into a proprietary runtime.

Q06Can you integrate open banking and bureau data cleanly?+

Directly. TrueLayer, Plaid, Tink, Yapily on the open-banking side. Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, ClearScore and CRIF on the bureau side. We orchestrate the calls, cache and version the data, and feed a firm-specific credit brain that can incorporate whichever alt-data sources (VAT filings, HMRC, e-commerce revenue, cashflow patterns) your product actually needs.

Q07Do you help with IFRS 9 ECL and forward-flow modelling?+

Yes. Our Treasury & Loan Book Intelligence work covers IFRS 9 ECL modelling, cohort P&L, forward-flow buyer analytics, cost-of-funds attribution and portfolio scenario planning. We ship models the risk committee can defend to the auditor.

Q08Can you handle broker and introducer portals?+

Yes. Packager workflows, sub-broker scoring, commission audit, fraud detection across introducer networks, and a modern broker portal that actually drives volume. Especially relevant for bridging, development finance, asset finance and specialist consumer where broker distribution is the whole game.

Q09What does 'AI Operator' actually mean for a lender?+

After a Build ships, KJ Capital continues as your fractional AI engineering team on a monthly retainer (from £8k/mo). We own the AI roadmap, ship new capabilities weekly, monitor the systems we deployed (models, portals, decisioning), and sit in your standups. It's the difference between a project that decays and one that compounds.

Q10How do you price a Build for a lender?+

Productised, not time-and-materials. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed duration — typically £45k–£300k depending on which of the eight lender capabilities you're shipping first. You see the price before you sign, and we deliver against it or we don't get paid.

Talk to us

Two-week Lender Diagnostic. Fixed price. Real proof-of-concept on your book.

The £15k Diagnostic is the fastest way to see what a KJ Capital build inside your firm actually looks like — written blueprint, working PoC on your data, and a fixed-price roadmap.

Book the Lender Diagnostic Send a two-line brief