Give your merchants credit without becoming a lender.

Through a lending partner. A bank, specialty lender, fintech lender or telco with lending permissions holds the licence, funds the lines and takes the credit decision. Your network brings the merchants, the trading data and, for secured lines, the warehouse. Zoral provides the software and the specialists. It does not lend, fund or hold money. Depending on the market, introducing credit or collecting repayments may itself need permission. The lawyers on both sides set the structure.

The network sees how a merchant buys, sells and pays, order by order, which an application form cannot show. For secured lines, it also sees the stock itself. You set the credit policy, pricing and appetite for each network, and your exposure to each one is shown separately. The same system can carry several networks, each configured to its sector, without a new build each time. Credit decisions stay with your credit committee.

While the merchant keeps paying, nothing happens to the stock. If it stops paying, the stock held in the network’s warehouse can be sold to repay what is owed, much as a vehicle is repossessed when lease payments stop. Credit scoring is designed to keep that rare. The security matters to the funder too. A secured lending book can attract debt funding for the lender’s own book on better terms. Stock is checked against the network’s warehouse records. It is valued after haircuts the funder sets, with lower values for ageing, slow-moving or perishable goods. The funder controls those settings.

The method stays the same. The settings change. Order cycles, seasonality, shelf life, typical returns and margins differ by sector. So eligibility, limits, haircuts and early-warning rules are configured for each sector and tested against the network’s past trading before launch. Each funder’s credit policy is configured on top. Lines move from secured to unsecured only when that funder’s policy and the programme’s own repayment history support it.

Dilution is measured from each merchant’s own history of returns, credit notes and disputes. The funder can set advance rates and reserves to reflect it. When goods come back after a drawdown, the available limit can be adjusted and the case flagged. Zoral fOS can also flag links between merchants and suppliers, such as shared addresses or bank accounts, and trading that jumps just before a drawdown. Your fraud and financial crime teams decide what happens to each case.

Trading data belongs to the network and its merchants, and reaches a lending partner only under the agreements, merchant permissions and data protection law that apply. You decide which data each programme uses. A merchant does not see another merchant’s data, and a lending partner sees only its own programme. Where a merchant is a sole trader, its data is personal data and is handled accordingly.

Yes. The same platform can carry these products: payables finance on invoices an anchor buyer has approved, receivables and invoice finance, and distributor and dealer finance. Each can be configured with its own eligibility, advance rates and pricing. Anchor, buyer and sector limits can be set. A change in an anchor’s behaviour, such as slower approvals or later payment, can raise an early warning. The limits, and any decision to change them, stay with your credit committee.

Yes, using the structures your Shariah board approves. Inventory finance suits Murabaha. In Murabaha, the funder buys the goods and sells them to the merchant at cost plus an agreed profit, paid later. Islamic and conventional programmes can run side by side. Your Shariah board remains the authority; Zoral provides the configurable structures and the evidence trail for its review.

AI agents help credit and operations teams reconcile repayments with drawdowns, check warehouse records against the collateral on each line, chase missing documents and draft periodic merchant and network reviews for people to check. They are configured to your policies and workflows, act only through the permissions, workflows and approvals you set, and what they do is recorded. Agents do not make credit decisions. Those follow policy and models the funder approves, and accountability stays with the funder. The funder chooses the language models behind them. They connect to Zoral fOS through a standard interface (MCP), within the environments and agreements the funder controls.

Often, yes, but data quality decides how much credit the data can support. We start by checking what you hold: whether each merchant is identified the same way across systems, whether orders link to deliveries, payments and returns, and whether the history covers a full trading cycle. We find gaps before the first line is drawn. The first programme can begin with the merchants whose records are complete. We give a realistic plan after scoping, not before.

The credit module is built on the Zoral Decision Engine and connects through documented interfaces. You send orders, deliveries, returns, payments and warehouse records as events or in regular files. You receive decisions, limits and alerts. The end-to-end system adds onboarding, drawdowns, repayments, collections and reporting. It connects to the lender’s payment and loan systems or to a Zoral account-level sub-ledger that posts to its general ledger. Your architects choose the connection for each partner.

On AWS or Azure in your chosen region, or in your own data centre, to suit data residency rules. Zoral is designed for high availability. If you use it, Zoral Document Fabric, which reads your documents, runs in your own AWS or Azure account, or your private cloud, in your region and under your control. Our controls are independently audited under SOC 2, with details on the Zoral Trust Portal. Zoral can run and support the platform for you, your own technology team can run it, or we share the work and hand over as your team grows. Your data, product definitions and audit history remain yours and can be exported in standard formats.

No. Zoral is an independent specialist founded in 2004, with over 100 projects behind it, and our platform is our own. We do not fund merchants or compete for them, so you choose your partners. A network can work with more than one lender, and a lender with more than one network. We have worked with clients regulated by the FCA in the UK, the CFPB in the US and the central banks of Malaysia and Thailand, and we have a long-standing relationship with KPMG.

Atelier, Zoral’s consulting and implementation team, works with your teams and, where you choose, with your advisers and systems integrators. The same team includes credit and data specialists who design programme limits from buyer and supplier data.

Credit risk and decisioning · Data, AI & Automation