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For most small business owners, getting a loan has always meant paperwork, branch visits and days of waiting. Teylor set out to change that, and identity verification turned out to be one of the unexpected linchpins of the whole experience.
SME lending has long been one of the last holdouts of analogue finance. Stacks of documents, wet signatures, and multi-week turnarounds were simply accepted as the cost of doing business. Teylor, Europe’s leading SME lending platform, decided that wasn’t good enough. By building a fully digital journey – from credit scoring to identity verification to legally binding contract signing – they’ve compressed what used to take weeks into under two working days. We spoke with Andre Cordesmeyer, Chief Commercial Officer at Teylor, about what that journey actually looks like, and what they’ve learned along the way.
Meet the Speaker
Andre Cordesmeyer, Chief Commercial Officer at Teylor, oversees all loan origination activities across the Teylor Group. He brings over eight years of experience in B2B sales and business development, with a focus on direct sales and building high-performing commercial teams. Before joining Teylor, he led sales development for LIQUI MOLY across Northern England and Scotland. He holds a degree in International Business Management and Marketing from Newcastle University and is based in Zurich.
CHAPTER 1: The Journey
1. Walk us through the SME onboarding journey, from loan application to funds disbursed. Where does identity verification sit in that flow, and how does it connect to the contract signing step?
Our goal is to make the entire SME financing journey digital while maintaining the strict regulatory standards in financial services. Our vision was to deliver a frictionless application experience: one that could be completed in just a few minutes and provide customers with an instant decision.
Typically, an SME customer begins by completing a digital loan application. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies, Teylor is able to score the customer’s creditworthiness in milliseconds and provide a loan offer instantly. If the customer decides to proceed, the next step is uploading the required business documentation through our customer portal. Part of this process is that the authorized company representative completes an identity verification. Through IDnow, a company representative completes a short, secure video call to verify their identity, with an instant decision delivered the moment it’s done.
Once the identity has been successfully verified, the borrower can proceed directly to finalizing the loan agreement. The whole process from application to payout should not take longer than one to two working days.
CHAPTER 2: Trust & Security
2. SME loan applicants are making a significant financial decision. How does having a live agent in the video verification step influence how borrowers feel about Teylor as a lender?
For many business owners, financing is one of the most important decisions they make. Fast finance can mean a critical project is realized in time, a new warehouse gets built to increase capacity, a go-to-market plan gets executed or – in an extreme case – bankruptcy is avoided. While business customers expect digital convenience, they also value confidence and transparency.
Having a trained identity verification specialist available during the video identification process provides reassurance that the verification is being carried out securely and professionally. It also gives applicants immediate assistance if they have questions or encounter difficulties with their identification documents.
Rather than feeling like an anonymous automated process, customers experience a secure digital interaction supported by a real person. We believe this helps build trust, particularly for first-time borrowers or companies completing a significant financing transaction online.
3. SME owners often have different expectations around data privacy and security than individual consumers. How does video identification and/or instant reverification address any specific security or data privacy concerns?
Business customers expect both convenience and compliance. They want assurance that sensitive personal and company information is handled securely and in accordance with the relevant regulations.
IDnow’s video identification supports this by providing a regulated identity verification process that satisfies KYC requirements while reducing the risk of identity fraud. Qualified electronic signatures provide a legally recognized way to sign financing contracts digitally, eliminating the need for paper-based processes without compromising legal compliance.
By combining secure identity verification with instant re-verification and qualified signing, customers know their identity is verified only once, their contract is legally binding, and the entire process remains fully digital and compliant with applicable regulations, provided in one single audit trail
CHAPTER 3: Operations & Reality
4. Instant reverification from IDnow lets you create a qualified signature directly from the verified identity data. How has that changed your process compared to using separate tools for IDV and signing? What impact has it had on speed and the client experience?
Connecting identity verification and qualified signing into a single workflow reduces unnecessary handoffs between systems.
Instead of asking customers to complete identity verification and then start a separate signing process, the verified identity data can flow directly into the signing step. This creates a more seamless experience for borrowers while simplifying operational processes for our teams.
From a customer perspective, it reduces clicks, eliminates duplicate steps, and reduces confusion. Operationally, it also lowers the likelihood of abandoned applications caused by switching between different providers or workflows.
Our objective has never been to maximize speed at the expense of security. Instead, we focus on using technology to remove unnecessary manual work while ensuring that identity verification, compliance, and contract execution remain robust and legally compliant.
Having one vendor for both IDV and signing] lowers the likelihood of abandoned applications caused by switching between different providers.
Andre Cordesmeyer, Chief Commercial Officer, Teylor
5. Many SME loans involve multiple people who need to be verified or sign contracts. How do you orchestrate that today – sequential, parallel, or something else? What’s been the hardest part of coordinating multi-party flows?
The exact workflow depends on the legal representation rules of the borrowing company.
Where appropriate, multiple authorized representatives can complete their verification and signing steps independently, while in other cases signatures need to follow a defined sequence based on company authorization requirements.
The biggest operational challenge is usually not the technology itself, but coordinating availability across multiple decision-makers while ensuring each person completes the required verification and signing steps without delaying the financing process.
6. How long does the typical SME applicant take to complete the full verification and signing journey? Are they mostly on mobile, desktop, or switching between devices?
If a borrower has their documents at hand, the whole process should not take more than a few minutes. Our goal is to complete the whole financing process from application to loan payout in less than two working days.
In practice, many SME customers complete their entire financing application on one device, mostly a smartphone or laptop, where they have access to company financial documents. Identity verification is completed using the camera of the smartphone or laptop.
Some customers also switch between devices, for example, if their desktop setup does not include a camera. Supporting a seamless cross-device experience is therefore important, allowing customers to complete the journey using whichever device is most convenient at each stage.
CHAPTER 4: What’s Next
7. When it comes to expanding to new markets, what are your main strategic focus areas – regulations, operational setup, or anything else?
Teylor is a multi-country, multi-product operation that has to balance different operational and regulatory requirements across jurisdictions. While regulations are increasingly harmonized across Europe, national rules still differ, and this matters for workflows like onboarding and identity verification. As we continue expanding across Europe, navigating additional regulatory requirements will only become more important. That’s why having a partner like IDnow, with strong international expertise and the ability to service our identification needs across borders, is critical for us.
That’s why having a partner like IDnow, with strong international expertise and the ability to service our identification needs across borders, is critical for us.
Andre Cordesmeyer, Chief Commercial Officer, Teylor
8. Looking back at your experience with IDnow’s video identification and instant reverification, what has made the biggest difference for your business and your clients? What’s the value you didn’t expect, or underestimated at the start?
One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to offer customers a truly continuous digital journey, from application to identity verification and legally compliant contract signing, without introducing unnecessary friction.
Initially, the focus was on compliance and operational efficiency. Over time, we have also seen how much customers value simplicity. Reducing process interruptions, avoiding duplicate data entry, and enabling borrowers to complete important financing steps in one digital journey has a meaningful impact on customer satisfaction as well as internal efficiency.
The key requirement is compliance, which we have prioritized from the start. The second priority is a frictionless onboarding process. In a digital world, it is not enough to “just” be digital, you need to make it as easy as possible for your customers.
The Infrastructure Behind the Promise
Speed is easy to promise. It is much harder to deliver when every step of a loan journey; credit scoring, compliance, identity verification, contract signing, has to meet the standards of regulated financial services.
What Teylor’s story makes clear is that the two-day turnaround is not a marketing claim built on shortcuts. It is the result of connecting the right technology at the right points in the journey, so that nothing has to stop, restart, or be repeated. Identity verification is not a gate customers pass through, it is a critical piece to make a complicated process easier.
For SME owners who have spent years navigating slow, paper-heavy lending processes, that continuity is not a small thing. It is the difference between a process that respects their time and one that doesn’t.
As Teylor continues to expand internationally, the fundamentals remain the same: compliance cannot be compromised, but friction can always be reduced. And in a market where trust is everything, the ability to offer borrowers a fast, transparent, and fully digital experience, backed by a real person at the moment it matters most, turns out to be a competitive advantage that compounds over time.
Ready to make lending faster? See how IDnow helps lenders verify borrowers and sign contracts digitally.
Author
Nikita Rybová
Customer & Product Marketing Manager at IDnow
Connect with Nikita on LinkedIn