Jason talks to Daire Burke, head of Canada for Swoop Funding. Swoop Funding is an Irish-based company that works in multiple countries. It provides companies with access to a platform that aggregates lending solutions to meet their needs from various commercial blenders. 

Episode Highlights:

• 00.46: Swoop is an online marketplace for small businesses looking to find funding for their business. We are giving business owners a tool to quickly find and compare funding products from right across the market, says Daire. 
• 04.24: In Canada, over a million companies are turning over less than $10 million, and those are the businesses that can probably benefit from our platform the most. The important point in the design is that this is a free-to-use service for businesses.
• 09.30: This is a real challenge, especially in Canadian banks, unless it is a small business loan backed by BBC, which the government backs, they’re not going to take a risk, but there are alternatives out there for funding, says Jason.
• 10.43: We have a range of other digital lenders, non-bank lenders, grant writing agencies, angel groups, and we are trying to ensure we have a marketplace to fit all the financing needs of smaller and medium business owners would have, says Daire. 
• 15.40: We have done white label projects with some of the biggest banks and their subsidiaries in the UK and NatWest, and that’s allowed them to serve their clients with other products that they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to, like grants or equity, explains Daire. 
• 22.31: Access to publicly available data on companies would benefit so many different areas of this industry. When you’re getting information on the business directors, the filings, the financials, and kind of proliferation of data have so many benefits, not just in transparency but also in designing new products and meeting the needs of businesses, says Daire. 

3 Key Points

1. Swoop Funding is trying to make small businesses get the most value from their data, empowering them to use data to find all of the products out there that can create value for their business. 
2. For the lenders in the Canadian SME lending space, the growth they have had over the last number of years has been very high, and you have to look at the reasons why that happens.
3. Daire explains that they have a massive period of growth for their business in covid because they were acquiring all new users trying to figure out what type of government funding programs they could be available. It enabled them to serve their users the best way that they could at that moment. 

Tweetable Quotes

• “There are some green sheets on opening up with digital, fintech, and non-bank lenders that use different models to make decisions.”- Daire Burke
• “The corporate beneficial ownership registry has been a real sticking point in an issue for a while and many standpoints.” – Jason 

Resources Mentioned:

• Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
• Woodgate.com – Sponsor
• Daire Burke – Website | Linkedin 

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