Five new AI applications your business needs to know about

Five fintech solutions you should consider implementing. Seven minutes each. A panel of Dragons who know what good looks like. An audience vote that decides the Technology Innovation Award.

All five are AI-driven and built to sit alongside existing systems rather than replace them. Four are already in production with named lender clients. The fifth, Trident in partnership with Finativ, is launching its asset finance proposition at the conference.

The Dragons’ Den session, sponsored by Lendscape, runs from 15:45 to 17:00 in the plenary room at the Finance Connect UK Summer Conference 2026 on Thursday 4th June.

Smarter Contracts — Wayne Lloyd, founder and chief executive

Smarter Contracts has built a blockchain-based platform for managing data permissions of every kind — basic T&Cs, privacy policies, delegated permissions, and multi-party sharing — through a single orchestration layer. Patented encryption removes the privacy risks usually associated with blockchain. Working with CreditSafe, the company is developing a business credit passport designed to improve the broker journey and give lenders better-quality data at onboarding.

Meelo — Antoine Flotard, head of UK and Ireland

Meelo is a French fintech tackling fraud and the risk of non-payment in lending. Its SaaS platform combines AI, open data, and open banking to verify identity, score solvency, and detect altered or AI-generated documents in seconds during customer onboarding. In France, Meelo works with nine in ten motor finance providers — including Stellantis, BMW Financial Services, Volkswagen Financial Services, Toyota Financial Services, Santander Consumer Banque, CA Auto Bank, Ayvens, Arval, Alphabet, Athlon, Leasys, Mobilize, Kinto, Drivalia, Sixt, and Europcar — alongside clients in consumer finance, asset finance, retail, and energy. Backed by a €14 million funding round in 2025, the company is now launching into the UK.

Wondle — Matt Cranny and Simon Carr, co-founders

Wondle applies computer vision and AI to vehicle damage assessment, replacing physical inspections with a smartphone-based capture process designed to be used by anyone — from a customer on their driveway to a trained fleet inspector. The platform produces time-stamped, annotated evidence, quantifies the financial impact of damage, and feeds repair triage, penalty billing, and remarketing decisions weeks before a vehicle is physically returned. Clients include Novuna, Octopus Electric Vehicles, Sytner Group, Dawson Group, and the BVRLA. Wondle is positioned as Consumer Duty compatible.

Resistant AI — Kristýna Schusterová, product manager, documents

Resistant AI uses machine learning to detect fraud and forgery in any document submitted during loan underwriting — bank statements, payslips, tax forms, ID documents, invoices, business registrations — including alterations invisible to the human eye and large-scale serial fraud using shared templates. The system has been trained on more than 150 million documents and returns a verdict in under 20 seconds. It is document-agnostic and integrates alongside existing origination and decisioning systems rather than replacing them. The company recently partnered with Experian on its new Transaction Forensics service for UK financial services.

Trident Intelligent Solutions and Finativ — Jack Saunders, technical director; Ryan Searle, co-founder; Zine Eddine Dif, chief revenue officer

Trident is an AI engineering firm with deep machine learning expertise built in regulated industries including water, healthcare, and government. In partnership with Finativ, it is bringing that capability into asset finance. The proposition is a single AI platform, hosted in the lender’s own environment, that sits across existing systems and provides centralised governance for how the organisation uses AI. It launches with four agents identified by Finativ’s client work as the most useful starting points: portfolio intelligence with natural-language interrogation; document processing and validation; pipeline and broker performance visibility; and proposal-to-payout workflow optimisation. The wider ambition is to give lenders the foundations — guardrails, semantic layers, and governance — to become genuinely AI-enabled organisations rather than accumulating another generation of disparate point solutions.