Steven Renwick, CEO of business finance firm Satago, explains how a new breed of FinTechs has emerged to transform the SME funding landscape.

Disruptive innovation designed to break the stranglehold of dominant business models shows no signs of abating. Netflix, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are the doyens of the on-demand economy as we know it today, inspiring entire generations of technology-driven businesses to challenge established models and strategies.

However, the financial services industry, long overdue radical transformation, has been slow to embrace (or arguably quick to resist) this form of disruptive thinking.

To be perfectly frank, when we started to look at the SME finance market, we were pretty shocked at how little the commercial finance industry had changed. Traditional lenders may now offer multi-channel delivery, including mobile, tablet, instant messaging and webchat, but when you peel away the veneer of digital delivery, the products haven’t altered fundamentally for decades.