Welcome to Tuum Talks Episode #12 – Unlocking Financial Inclusion with Plug-in Overdrafts
Recorded Live: Monday, April 7, 2025
Host: Rivo Uibo, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Tuum
Panelist: Marko Sjoblom, Founder & CEO of Fiinu
Can overdrafts be unbundled from current accounts?
In this episode of Tuum Talks, Tuum Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Rivo Uibo is joined by Marko Sjoblom, Founder & CEO of Fiinu, to explore how a unique approach to credit is challenging legacy norms and opening new avenues for financial inclusion.
Fiinu’s Plug-in Overdraft® is a first-of-its-kind, bank-agnostic overdraft product designed to work independently of a customer’s current account provider. Enabled by open banking, it empowers consumers to access credit without switching banks—bridging a critical gap in today’s lending landscape.
Together, Rivo and Marko unpack the concept, the regulatory journey, and what it takes to deliver innovative credit infrastructure at scale.
Why Watch?
- Demystify the Plug-in Overdraft®: Understand how Fiinu has unbundled overdrafts from current accounts to unlock new access to credit.
- Hear Fiinu’s origin story: From securing a banking license to pivoting toward a white-label infrastructure model.
- Explore open banking in action: Learn how customer consent, live transactional data, and VRP (variable recurring payments) underpin a new way to offer credit.
- See how Tuum supports the model: Hear why Fiinu chose Tuum as its core banking partner and how the platform accelerated their time to market.
- Dive into inclusion and innovation: Discover how technology and infrastructure can close the credit access gap while supporting scalable, compliant growth.
Fiinu’s mission is simple yet bold: make overdraft access more inclusive, more intelligent, and more collaborative. Tune in to learn how their partnership with Tuum—and their belief in the power of open banking—is powering a new era of embedded credit infrastructure.
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Watch the full episode above and get in touch to learn more about how Tuum can support your digital lending journey.
Unlocking Financial Inclusion with Plug-in Overdrafts
[Full Transcript]
Rivo Uibo: [00:00:00] A very good Monday morning to everyone, and welcome to join the webinar about plug-in overdraft. My name is Rivo, and I’m one of the founders of Tuum. Today we’ll demystify a super exciting concept about plug-in overdraft with Marko, who is the founder and CEO of Fiinu. Marko, please introduce yourself and share a few words, what brought you here today.
Marko Sjoblom: Hi, Rivo. Welcome everybody. Marko Sjoblom is my name. What brought us here, a lot of hard work, many years. It was about financial inclusion to begin with, but a lot of innovation has gone into this over the last eight years, more or less. Anyway, that’s really about that.
Rivo Uibo: [00:01:00] Cool. But let’s start with the demystification process. Tell us, what sparked the idea of the plug-in overdraft, and what did you see in the market that traditional lenders were missing out there?
Marko Sjoblom: I think it’s overly complicated; they said demystifying. There’s a need in the market for specific credit products, always has, always will. This is unsecured credit in particular.
The background of, this was I had a business prior to Fiinu, which was doing overdraft style lending in the UK. I learned a lot of certain lessons throughout the journey of that business. One of them was about access to stable funding, which in other words, bank license allows you to solve. But the other one was also about the type of credit that people should have. It matters a lot what type of credit individuals are taking, especially when it’s less mainstream or non-bank versus a banking credit.
There are also a lot of other, this is a complicated question, but there’s inertia in banking. People are more likely to get divorced than to switch their bank. This is a, again, statistical fact from the FCA.
Therefore, if you look at all of those things, I started thinking about how could you introduce an overdraft product, which is a like a lowest or the smallest credit product from the mainstream banking, to the masses without them needing to switch their bank? This is a weird concept to think about at the start. We were very close on doing that with my previous firm, except that it wasn’t a bank. Therefore it didn’t really come to our radar how to allow people to switch. But then when open banking started developing in this specific direction, I thought, “Oh, hang on a minute. You can actually unbundle an overdraft from a current account.”
There’s a lot of similarities to the likes of Wise, which is offering a completely different product, but TransferWise unbundled international transfer from a current account. You don’t have to do all of your financial transactions through your bank any longer.
But unbundling an overdraft is a peculiar concept. I’m not aware of anybody else that has unbundled a credit product from a current account or from their bank. It’s a start of a journey. Open banking allows us to do that because it’s a customer consent that gives that access. Banks cannot prevent anybody from providing these so-called third party providers to provide a service, if you give access to your data. then from that data we’ll be able to offer you something. It’s complicated.
Rivo Uibo: Oh yeah, indeed. What I find super interesting is also that this solution is quite collaborative. It’s not competitive, as you mentioned. Traditionally, the High Street banks would require you to have both the current account and an overdraft product from one single institution. But now you have enabled the unbundling around it.
Any other nuances that have shaped the direction, about the role of bank agnostic plug-in financial services industries, reshaping the overall credit landscape?
Marko Sjoblom: A lot of the times, be it investors or potential other banking clients, they say, “We are providing overdrafts.” Or if it’s an investor, they say they are already providing an overdraft, what’s different between what you offer?
Because what we have is this standalone environment alongside any existing technology that anybody has in-situ. That’s another inertia. No bank wants to start introducing very easily a material outsourcing big technology platform in, into the bank because it intervenes and puts a lot of other existing operations at risk.
Therefore when you develop or have developed something that is completely independent, sits alongside, and your methods are very different. The methods, we don’t have time to unravel and open, all the methods, how we do differently to say any other existing bank. But you could think of it this way. If you look at the current landscape in the UK as an example, after the big overdraft reform, and this is a data from one of the credit reference agencies, only 10% of the newly opened current accounts today get access to an overdraft, and only 20% of the market actually has access to an overdraft.
In other words, 90% does not get access to an overdraft when they first open up a credit account. Equally, 80% of the market does not have access. These are existing bank accounts, and there are more than a hundred million bank accounts in the UK. The question now is, how can we reopen that market? We are doing something completely different. Again, our approval rate is substantially higher than that. That’s because we do things very differently.
But again there’s two sides to it. One is existing banking infrastructures and technologies. The other one is the market behaviour.
Rivo Uibo: Fantastic numbers. I really love also that you have found an interesting angle, how to tackle the financial inclusion side of the things on the market, because it’s really untapped. Plus using the open banking grails to enable and empower the solution. Really great to hear.
Also congratulations, you have just also secured your first UK banking partner. Some of you who have also joined us on the call today, maybe you have missed the news, but Marko, can you tell us more about the first banking partner deal that you have done? How did you balance all the regulatory readiness, time to market, the scalability of tech, and so on? Give us some more.
Marko Sjoblom: The background of this was that we obtained a full deposit-taking banking license ourselves first from the Bank of England. This was July, 2022. As any other newly authorized bank, most of them go through what they call a 12-month mobilization. The latest one going through this mobilization that I’m aware of, is Revolut.
At the end of this mobilization period, you have to attest a number of different things to the PRA and the FCA that they set at the start of that mobilization program. In our case, it was 19 conditions that we had to meet, and we were able to attest 18 out of 19. Technology platform was one; but this included an independent audit of that technology platform, that was done by Grant Thornton. Also there was a technical regulators team walkthrough at our offices. We were completely ready to go. Literally, we could have pressed the button and launched the product.
The last condition that we didn’t or were unable to meet was the regulatory capital. We didn’t have enough capital to launch. This was a spring 2023, which was an incredibly difficult time to raise any money for particular pre-revenue bank. It wasn’t a favourable environment, so we failed on that. Unfortunately we had to, in effect, put the license on hold. We had to render it back.
From the back of that, we didn’t give up on this whole idea. We had now developed the technology. It was very stressing to start, doing cost cuttings and not to be able to launch the bank. But since we had developed the platform, we started then after a few months contacting a few banks, and we were also being contacted by some. We then continued those discussions. The deal is not final yet, but we signed the heads of terms and we are progressing well with the first deal in the UK. This took 12 months overall from start to finish.
As to the second part of your question, there is a, what we call a SYSC8, which is an outsourcing related guideline set by the FCA. The EBA guidelines or outsourcing rule book is pretty much the same across Europe. It’s a very thick document overall. As a bank, you have to follow certain procedures, especially when it’s a material outsourcing provider.
But in our case, having gone through quite a rigorous program with the PRA and the FCA, it helped us convince that what we have can work and it will work. We still have to deliver it naturally, to those standards.
Rivo Uibo: Great. You have found a specific market niche, where to offer your services and the plug-in overdraft. That means that you are using different like tech vendors to enable to launch any solution of that kind.
As I come from Tuum and also Fiinu is a happy customer of Tuum, can you give us any highlights which were the critical capabilities that were essential to bring this innovation to life at scale? What was really important when you made the choice to also select Tuum to be your core provider on the background?
Marko Sjoblom: Without going into too much detail, we also had to go through the SYSC8 related process. I think we had 11 or 12 vendors that we looked at for our core banking, then shortlisted that to the most useful suspects.
Some of the key points and findings were ultimately on the scalability, the easiness of use. In Tuum’s case there were a number of things that we liked: the API first of all, then the fact that we know some other reference clients of yours. You look at the total cost over a five-year period, and Tuum provides a very good value for money. It’s the latest of the latest.
If people look at very traditional core banking systems and the cost of these systems, they can be incredibly expensive. The newer ones that have come to the market such as Tuum, provide much better value for money in my opinion, much more flexibility. They’ve been built for digital age natively, and that makes a huge difference.
If I look at, as an example, the cost of our implementation, it was on time, in budget, and I think was probably done in about 12 weeks, something like that, start to finish. Some of the others said, “Yeah, it will probably take about two years.” I’m like, “You don’t live in this world.”
Rivo Uibo: Times have changed!
Marko Sjoblom: Those are the very interesting things. I’m looking at one question that I’m seeing here, I’m just jumping into that if you don’t mind. There’s a question about the current accounts, the secondary, what’s the difference?
The major thing that people don’t always understand or need to understand to, I defended my thesis in unbundling banking services and there’s AI driven methodologies. The underlying method, the way people or banks underwrite basically everything, is based on a very old principle. This is a Fair Isaac, FICO based model, and it is looking at the probability of default. That probability of default is the starting point. In other words, if you apply for a mortgage or an overdraft, the bank asks, or the computer often when it says no, it then looks at, how likely is Rivo to default? What is the probability of default? That’s the starting point of a question.
Now, we’ve reversed that. We know that the PD model works really well for secured products like mortgages and various other products. But we’re of the view that, because it looks back six years of transactional history and payment history, for a product whose use is typically for less than two weeks, such as overdraft, it’s not fit for purpose. This is where the open banking part comes to play, because you can get live access to transactional data. It’s much more relevant.
Let’s say that somebody’s a 24-year-old, and they’ve made a mistake at the age of 18. The old model could look back all the way to six years ago when mistakes have been made. For a product that you only use for two weeks, it’s not ideal. It’s suboptimal. Therefore it is looking at the transactional data, first of all, as a starting point, that is much more important.
But there’s much more to it. It’s not that straightforward. There’s a complicated way we do things behind the scenes, and it’s been tested. That’s the major difference, is what methods do you use?
I myself, as an example, applied for a Monzo overdraft just because I wanted to test that, and I didn’t get one. Whoever has asked this question, I don’t know whether they’ve got one, but they’re clearly using a different method.
Rivo Uibo: Thank you, Marko, for providing that insight. Super interesting. Let’s continue on the theme of financial inclusion. This is centrepiece to Fiinu’s mission. How do you define like the financial inclusion? Currently at year 2025, going forward, how does the technology play a role, AI, tech, and so forth? Can you shed some light on these types of keywords?
Marko Sjoblom: There are two very important parts to it. One relates to the mortgage market, and one relates to what Andrew Bailey calls ‘the water bed effect’.
We had a major reform in the overdraft legislation in 2020 in the UK. Going back in time, in 2019 you had 33 million people using at least once per annum some form of overdraft. That’s a big proportion of the 54 million people of the population using a product. Then overnight, 16.5 million people lost access to this somewhat obscure product called ‘unarranged overdraft’. That was the unintended consequence of the reform. In other words, every bank started rejecting transactions that take you overdrawn. Transactions literally didn’t go through anymore. This was because the banks were not allowed to charge any fixed fees whatsoever. We predicted this well in advance that this is what will happen. The regulators didn’t necessarily agree with us, but banks ultimately made their own policies around that.
Now, this then brings us back to the waterbed effect. What Andrew Bailey was saying, he was still with the FCA at that time, he said that what especially in the unsecured credit market, is that when you take away a specific product from the market, you don’t take away the credit need. It pops up in the other parts of the market, like in the waterbed. This is exactly what we saw. ‘Buy now, pay later’ was a big beneficiary of this upside; the credit need was still there.
But unfortunately, according to various different peer-reviewed papers as well as FCA data, a lot of these products have adverse effects on credit files. Some of them drop the credit scores by about 10%. An overdraft on the other hand, keeps it at least level, but some CRA data suggested it could improve the credit score. It depends on what the numbers are. But there’s also link to the wider economy when it comes to mortgage lending. Because according to mortgage strategy, 65% of the first time borrower mortgage applications get rejected if the applicant has one such non-bank product in their credit file.
There’s a whole host of things around the financial inclusion. Why this small, little product, when you’re on the right side of the credit, actually helps that financial inclusion. This is thanks to open banking, the way I see it.
Rivo Uibo: Great. Marko, there are like few additional questions from the audience. As we spoke just about the financial inclusion, there is one question about plug-in overdraft being available to SMEs in Africa.
Marko Sjoblom: Yeah, brilliant question. The same methodology can be adopted. We’ve tested previously the model. This wasn’t part of Fiinu, but previously we’ve tested the model in Spain, Australia, Canada, and in the UK. The model should therefore work. The principle of the technology also works. What doesn’t necessarily work is the open banking part; that needs solving. It can be solved through screen scraping.
There was a question also, the one that I see about Africa, it’s about the SMEs. The principles of underwriting work also for the SMEs, however, it’s not been tested. It’s the same principle that would be applied, the credit limits would be larger than they are for retail customers. But it needs further work, for sure.
But we are looking at it in a such a way that, in Europe alone, if you bundle UK and European Union, you have about four and a half thousand banks that we could offer this to as a technology solution. We want to have as many banks effectively using our platform. We have an ambition to become an infrastructure. That’s really what we want to do. We could have hundreds of banks hopefully adopting this technology, so that the financial inclusion element is now spread across the market by various different banks.
It was never our ambition to own the market, say in the UK, on our own. We just said we want to set it up first as a bank ourselves, so that we show to the people that it works and we have a performance data, et cetera. I think Oak North has done something somewhat similar. Oak North Bank and Oak North Technology, I really admire what they’ve been doing. Their focus has been on the SME side, and they’ve been providing their underwriting technology now to, I think about 20, 25 different banks. This is a similar proposition, similar thinking, but on the retail space.
Rivo Uibo: Very interesting. It’s fair to say that when it comes to Africa, you guys are willing to consider the white-labelling opportunities. When it comes to SMEs there is still additional piece of work to be done because of, like you mentioned, the size of credit limits, also the way you assess the risk, and it’s the question about whether the open banking rails are available or not, because those are the critical underlying enablers for you.
Marko Sjoblom: The key to this is that, especially if I look at the previous company and its history, we were underwriting without credit reference agencies data. That’s the key here. In some developed countries, and let alone in some undeveloped countries, there is no CRA data available and/or it’s weak, so we’re looking at transactional data, which is more important. If somebody’s interested in outside of Europe, we’ll have a look. They should definitely get in touch with us. It’s very simple.
Rivo Uibo: Marko, now another very important question. We made a reference before to the first bank partner that you have signed the head of terms, in the UK. Now the question, when will the product be live with the bank you mentioned?
Marko Sjoblom: As per our announcement, we’re saying it’s the last quarter of this year.
Rivo Uibo: Thank you. Another question from the audience. How do you see also the plug-in overdraft model translating into the long-term value creation and potential market cap? What milestones would you be out watching for over the next 12 to 18 months for Fiinu?
Marko Sjoblom: First of all, for those who aren’t necessarily familiar with Fiinu story, we’re listed on the London Stock Exchange. You can find us with the Ticker Bank. The current market cap is around 20, 25 million, something like that. It’s in my opinion fairly low, especially in comparison to where we were a couple of years ago when we first got the banking license. I also invested at that point a million pounds myself, at 20P a share, and our current market share price is probably about 7 or 8.
As a result of that, I’m unable to tell you what’s going to happen in the next 12 to 18 months. It’ll be against the rules and regulations as a publicly limited company. But I would just say, put us on a watch list and see how things happen. The next thing is we’ll deliver for the first deal, and then hopefully there will be many more to come.
Rivo Uibo: Seeing is believing. I think that is the comment from my end.
Marko Sjoblom: Exactly.
Rivo Uibo: The next question, also incredibly relevant one. Reaching hundreds of banks across the UK and Europe is a bold ambition. Doesn’t it pose a significant challenge around regulation, localization, and scalability? How do you plan to navigate such hurdles?
Marko Sjoblom: Is it a bold ambition? There are thousands of banks. I don’t necessarily disagree or think that is overly bold, if somebody thinks that. I think it’s achievable. But does it pose a risk? First of all, we would not be under regulation if it was a pure technology solution that we provided. The banks would still be under regulation. But it is in our interest that everything is compliant and works that way.
The components that we put together, they are very well known in the market. Like Tuum, you work with various different banks. The other components that we use for the platform are also being used widely by the industry. We have our bespoke things inside there that nobody else has got. The localization and scalability, we did already a penetration tests for the UK. Scalability for the likes of, when you select the right types of solutions, Tuum being a very good example of that, I don’t know Rivo if you have tried to break your system with volumes, but we have. It’s incredibly scalable.
Even if we had hundreds of millions of clients in one environment, yes, you just buy more power, and it works. But it’s not like we have only one environment. When we sign hopefully our next client and next client and next client, they’re separate environments. They don’t all use the same environment. The components have gone through a penetration test because of our own process that we needed to attest to the regulators in the UK.
Localization means languages, pricing and these generic things, but these are very easy to change. We’ve done various different market studies around this. The key to that is that open banking works. The party that we, as an example, have used for some of our open banking, they cover already 95% of all of the Euros on banks. In the UK we’ve tested, and we have technical access to more than a hundred million bank accounts already. But across Europe we have a technical access to 95% of all of the Eurozone bank accounts.
Rivo Uibo: Maybe to sum up with a quote is that, if it would be easy, then everybody would be doing it. Not easy, but definitely worthwhile.
Marko, we have time for two additional questions before we have to finish over here. The first one, how is Fiinu’s plug-in overdraft product sold? Is it by the partner bank or is it direct to consumer? Do you see it being offered on the aggregator platforms?
Marko Sjoblom: It’ll be sold as, call it a bank, I shouldn’t say ABC, because there is a bank, ABC. I’ll call it Bank XYZ. A plug-in overdraft powered by Fiinu, that’s probably how it’ll be marketed. It’s not us who is actually selling the product. It’s that bank who sells the product. We are behind the scenes providing tech technology to that. It’ll be direct to consumers. That’s about it. Was there something else in that question? I think that was it. Sorry, I missed.
Rivo Uibo: That was it. Now we need to tackle the last question, and that is the most fundamental question. How does the technology actually work? How does it connect to the current account? That is literally the last question that we’ll tackle.
Marko Sjoblom: That’s really easy. If you’re not familiar with open banking, you ask a customer a consent to, first of all, view the account. That’s the starting point. This what we do during the onboarding. Within three minutes when somebody onboards with us, the uniqueness is that we also give them a credit.
Following that, when they start using the product, they agree to another level of what open banking provides. The first part is what we call an AISP. The second level is what we call a PISP, which is allowing you to make transfers within the account, between our account and the other accounts the client wants to connect. The third part that we also use is we use a VRP, variable recurring payment methodology within open banking, that allows you to make certain payments. It is more flexible than direct debit. We control that flow between the overdraft and then the main account.
That’s the way it works. It’s a little bit difficult to explain that without any visuals.
Rivo Uibo: That means we’ll be watching you guys making the progress, watching the announcements, and expecting the go live to happen end of the current year.
Marko, thanks a million for joining us and for tackling a number of questions that emerged from the audience. Also thank you everyone for joining the webinar. The webinar has been recorded. It’ll be made available. Please do not hesitate to get in touch either with the folks here at Tuum or with Marko from Fiinu. We are more than happy to provide more insights and tackle any question left out there.
Thank you for joining, and I wish you a lovely day ahead.
Marko Sjoblom: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Rivo Uibo: Bye-bye.
Get in touch to find out more.