London, UK, 24th March – Sikoia, the leading Customer Verification Platform for financial services, today announced its expansion into the motor finance sector, marked by its new membership of the Finance & Leasing Association (FLA) Motor Finance Division.

The move comes at a pivotal time for the motor finance sector, as firms continue to manage the impact of the FCA’s review of historic motor finance commission arrangements. As the industry looks beyond remediation and towards the future, there is growing focus on strengthening affordability assessments, improving transparency and building more robust decisioning processes.

While credit and vehicle data have advanced significantly in recent years, affordability assessment remains one of the most manual and operationally intensive parts of underwriting. Many lenders still rely on fragmented processes and surface-level data, making it difficult to assess customers with complex or non-traditional income.

As a result, customers who are genuinely affordable are often declined simply because lenders lack the evidence needed to confidently approve them.

Sikoia addresses this challenge by combining Open Banking and AI-powered document intelligence to automate income verification and affordability assessment. The platform provides structured, explainable and auditable financial data, enabling lenders to make faster, more consistent and better-informed decisions.

The company has already begun supporting innovation in the sector through its partnership with UK car finance challenger Finclusion. By embedding Sikoia’s technology from day one, Finclusion enables customers to share financial information in the way that suits them while instantly validating income and affordability, delivering faster and more confident lending decisions for dealers and customers.

Alexis Rog, CEO of Sikoia, said:

“Motor finance lenders want to lend more, particularly to customers with complex financial profiles. The barrier is confidence. Firms need stronger, richer affordability evidence and decisions they can clearly explain and defend.

Our expansion into motor finance reflects the growing demand for better data and smarter automation to support responsible lending at scale.”

Regulatory expectations are also evolving, with increasing focus on consistency, explainability and auditability in affordability assessments. Open Banking and bank statement data are rapidly becoming a core component of modern underwriting, moving from optional to expected.

By helping lenders replicate human-quality underwriting with richer data and full audit trails, Sikoia enables firms to improve operational efficiency, strengthen compliance and responsibly approve more customers.

Sikoia’s membership of the FLA Motor Finance Division marks the next stage in its mission to modernise lending across the UK and support the evolution of the motor finance market.

‍