CUB Finance

CUB Finance’s mission is to deliver high-quality, cost-effective shared services that strengthen credit unions’ sustainability and growth.

CUB Finance Ltd is a cooperative venture formed and owned by a group of Credit Unions.  The CUSO (Credit Union Service Organisation) is designed to unite credit unions so they can access new markets without incurring significant development cost, thereby enhancing the financial well-being of their members. All operations and decisions are grounded in cooperative values and the FCA’s Consumer Duty to achieve good outcomes for members.

Loan applications originate from ClearScore, and are passed into CUB’s decisioning flow. At present, this is focused on unsecured loans for the purpose of car finance.

The applications are from people who may have historic issues, but have no recent adverse behaviours and have proven affordability.

CUB assesses whether the application meets the agreed lending criteria and which credit unions have available funds and how to fairly distribute applications across members.

Each month, credit unions indicate how much funds for lending they wish to allocate to CUB Finance lending. This then provides them with predictable volumes and controlled exposure.

Each participating credit union has its own version of the BTR Future loan decisioning platform, where they review the full application by checking the credit file and open banking data and take the final lending decision.

Why This Works When Other Approaches Didn’t
CUB Finance succeeds because the platform and distribution are all managed centrally, but the final lending decision and member relationship is maintained locally.

This is specifically designed with the credit union market in mind and CUB is owned and run by its members. Crucially, CUB Finance avoids forcing every credit union to build broker capability themselves, instead, it creates a shared infrastructure.