Helping banks launch SME lending products in weeks rather than months is the goal of a newly announced strategic partnership between 10x Banking and ezbob.

“Banks are too often asked to choose between a broad suite that is difficult to adapt and a collection of point solutions that never quite connect,” 10x Banking Chief Product & Technology Officer Okan Ozaltin said. “Neither gets a lender to market quickly. Bringing our core and ledger together with a specialist origination platform gives them a faster, lower-risk route to market and the flexibility to keep evolving it afterwards. SME lending is where customers can get the most value, which is why we are starting there.”

10x Banking and ezbob are focused on closing what they called “one of the most persistent digital experience gaps in UK financial services” in their partnership announcement. The companies noted that while incumbent banks have digitalized and automated simpler retail customer journeys, modernizing SME lending has been a slower process. These challenges reflect both the greater complexity of SME lending compared to retail lending and the limitations of systems built on workflow tools or legacy cores that fail to create a connected customer journey.

The partnership combines 10x Banking’s cloud-native banking platform with ezbob’s lending technology. 10x will provide the modular core and ledger, while ezbob will orchestrate onboarding, application handling, credit decisioning, and AI agents. Open integration enables specialist components to be connected without forcing a bank into a single closed suite. Shared components can be reused to introduce additional lending products instead of building a new silo each time.

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