FF News Tattoo Studio: Bourn on Reinventing the Business Overdraft

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Fintech Talents 2025 Bourn co-founder Roger Vincent explains how his company is rethinking business overdrafts for SMEs.

Vincent says Bourn is focused on reinventing a 300 year old product that banks have quietly withdrawn. Business overdrafts once made up around 30% of business finance but are now closer to 5% and over the same period, fintechs and alternative lenders have stepped in, so that banks today only provide roughly 40% of SME finance, with about 60% now coming from newer players. Bourn’s mission is to help banks and lenders “fight back” by offering a modern version of the overdraft that actually reflects how businesses trade today.

Bourn offers a business account that connects to a company’s accounting software and existing bank accounts and by seeing invoices raised, payments due and day-to-day cash flow across accounts, the platform feeds a risk engine that can assess the business in real time. Vincent explains that this allows Bourn to offer an overdraft that’s effectively secured against receivables, with limits that adjust based on outstanding invoices and trading patterns, rather than a fixed, old-style facility.

When asked “why you?”, Vincent points to the founding team’s background. Vincent has spent years building credit scores, selling technology into banks and working inside large financial institutions, giving him a feel for how slow and complex they are to change. Co-founder Nick is a former commercial banker who used to sanction lending deals, while co-founder Paul is a technologist and former CTO who built payments infrastructure. Vincent argues that together they have the banking, risk and technology mix to build a regulated fintech with its own customers  and in doing so become a kind of North Star for banks looking to modernise.

On what motivates him, Vincent highlights the UK’s large working capital gap as many SMEs are trying to grow but can’t get funding, even with strong order books and mentions businesses stuck with a £10,000 overdraft while holding £300,000 of unpaid invoices. The impact of this is being able to offer them £50,000 or £75,000 instead and seeing the relief and opportunity this creates for customers, he says, is a big part of what keeps him going.