The digital landing: an expanding sector with growing operators

BorsadelCredito.it changes its name and becomes Opyn: thrust on technology and international expansion with embedded finance. Corporate lending is a rapidly developing sector internationally: according to the University of Cambridge’s Center for Alternative Finance, in 2020 loans to SMEs reached 43 billion euros worldwide (excluding China), an increase 51% year over year. The US lent over 27 billion in 2020, the UK 14 billion and Europe 4.4 billion. In this context, Italy appears to be the most vigorous market in continental Europe: according to the A to Z Fintech report produced by the Politecnico di Milano, Unioncamere and Innexta, the volume of disbursements achieved by direct lending in 2020 in Italy is of over 1.6 billion, up 4.5 times over the previous year. A growth that is also accelerating: according to the latest P2P Market Data report for the month of July, since the beginning of 2021 lending companies have already lent over 2 billion.Opyn is positioned among the main Italian companies and on a par with many competitors European in terms of size, volumes disbursed and above all technological capital. The Italian company of digital lending to businesses updates its look in view of a growth increasingly based on embedded finance, through new agreements with financial and corporate institutions. Opyn was born from the evolution of BorsadelCredito.it and the operation marks the start of a new phase of maturity in the life of the company, consolidating an expansion of the business that sees fintech alongside the digital lending service that of embedded finance, always structuring itself more as a technological enabler for traditional finance and for non-financial companies by licensing its software to third parties. Opyn marks the definitive transition of the company, founded in 2012, from a peer to peer lending platform to a Digital Lender and Lending as a Service Platform.Opyn, in addition to being one of the leading digital lending platforms in Europe, it is also a partner for banks, asset managers and large non-financial companies, aimed at helping them in digitization: it makes its lending technology available to companies that want to meet the growing need for simplicity and speed of SMEs, in a context in which the latter require more streamlined and entirely paperless services. The focal point of the new positioning of the company will be its proprietary technology, developed over almost 10 years, flexible and customizable, which consists of software based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, in which neural networks exchange information from node to node, they draw inferences and learn from the data. The new brand closed the first half of 2021 with approximately 6 million euros in revenues (compared to 4 in the whole of 2020) and approximately 2 million in positive EBITDA. Numbers that project for the end of 2021 a year-on-year growth of about 4 times the revenues and 10 times the EBITDA. The company’s race fits into an equally positive context. The European alternative lending market, in fact, is a thriving market: according to Statista forecasts, it will reach 8 billion euros in 2021. Similarly, the development opportunities for the embedded finance sector are also considerable. According to a recent report by McKinsey, the economic profits of the world’s leading banks and insurance companies declined by $ 800 and $ 300 billion respectively between 2015 and 2018, with a further deterioration in recent years due to the crisis following the pandemic. In this context, embedded finance offers a valuable growth opportunity for traditional financial institutions: a potential market worth over $ 7 trillion, roughly double the current market value of the world’s top thirty banks.