Deutsche Bank has supplied up to £250 million in financing to British AI-powered lending FinTech Abound.

The UK business uses Open Banking and AI to provide “fair loans” based on what consumers can afford to repay.

The latest investment, which will be used for customer loans and scaling its operations, takes the company's total lending capacity to £1.6 billion.

Abound describes itself as one of the UK's fastest-growing FinTechs, with the company having issued more than £650 million since its launch.

The company announced it had turned profitable in April 2024, three years after launching.

Abound was founded in 2020 by credit experts Gerald Chappell, previously global head of digital lending at McKinsey, and Dr Michelle He, a former director at EY where she worked with banks and financial institutions on lending and credit analytics.

Deutsche Bank's funding follows existing facilities from several funders, including Citi, Waterfall Asset Management, and LuminArx.

“This new facility from Deutsche Bank further evidences the power of our bank-transaction data led AI credit decisioning technology," said Gerald Chappell, chief executive and co-founder of Abound. "Open Banking has become a mature and widely adopted technology in the UK, and is now used by nearly 20 million people.

"As more and more countries around the world adopt Open Banking, we’re perfectly poised to start taking what’s worked in the UK, global.”

The personal lending company secured a fundraise of more than £500 million in 2023, with the funding round comprised of debt and equity financing from investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Hambro Perks.

Deutsche Bank recently bet on Norwegian provider of automated governance solutions for software delivery Kosli as part of a $10 million funding round.

Kosli, which launched last Friday, addresses several software delivery compliance challenges for financial institutions and other highly regulated industries through tools including automated controls and audit, customer security protections, engineering-focused controls, and change management automation.

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