London-headquartered Codat’s financial technology offer will play a key role in allowing seamless and secure exchange of data between Virgin Money and its business bank customers.

The agreement is the latest partnership from Virgin Money as it continues to develop its working capital health proposition, which aims to transform the Bank’s existing business current account and forms part of its commitment relating to the recent £35m award from the Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) Capability and Innovation Fund.

A key part of Codat’s remit with Virgin Money will be to help drive the insight that the Bank will provide to customers as part of its SME wellness tracker, which will launch later this year. Further application of the technology is being explored in order to accelerate the Bank’s commitments to enhancing working capital health solutions for SMEs, and data-driven insights for relationship managers.

Codat connects the internal systems of small businesses to banks, FinTechs and other financial institutions, allowing business data to flow back and forth in real time. Enabling financial services organisations to integrate with a wide and growing range of accounting, banking, and commerce platforms used by SMEs means banks and lenders can ultimately improve the products and services they offer their customers.

Codat is a British start-up founded in London in 2017. It has received £7.5m in awards from the BCR Capability and Innovation Fund to facilitate the commercialisation of financial technology that is relevant to SMEs. In 2020, the FinTech secured investment from Index Ventures and announced several new commercial and data partnerships including with Microsoft.

Gavin Opperman, group business director at Virgin Money, said: “Our working capital health proposition will be unique to the business banking market and Codat is an important ingredient which will help us realise our ambitions in this area. A key part of our approach is collaboration with external partners like Codat, bringing expertise and knowledge to help build a compelling customer proposition. By introducing clever, intuitive software, customers will have a new level of insight to help them understand their own business, allowing them to manage efficiently and grow their operations.”

Pete Lord, CEO at Codat, added: “We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Virgin Money because they recognise the importance of building a bank with the best data infrastructure from the outset. Our API offers many powerful use cases that strengthen the relationship between bank and customer. It is a foundation for the future of banking and a journey we are very excited to partner on with Virgin Money.”