Fivetran Selected by Oakbrook Finance to Support Real-time Lending Decisions and AI-ready Data Operations

Fivetran, the data foundation for AI, announced that specialist UK consumer lender Oakbrook Finance has selected the company to centralise and govern data across its analytics estate. The deployment supports customer insight, product development, marketing effectiveness and machine learning workflows, while saving Oakbrook’s data engineering team approximately three months of build time.

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Founded in 2011, Oakbrook is a specialist consumer lender serving near-prime and non-prime borrowers across the UK who are typically overlooked by mainstream banks. The business has lent more than £1.5 billion to UK customers and currently serves around 140,000 active borrowers. A significant share of applications comes through price comparison platforms, where Oakbrook typically has less than 10 seconds to ingest data, run its models, and return an offer.

“Our data engineering team is lean and deliberately focused. Before Fivetran, a meaningful chunk of their time was spent maintaining pipelines rather than building things that move the business forward,” said Ed Ball, Head of Data and Security at Oakbrook. “Fivetran has let us connect data sources we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, which has materially expanded what we can analyse and model, from customer behaviour through to how our products perform in the market. That’s directly fed into work like the launch of OakbrookOne, our debt consolidation product.”

To meet these requirements without increasing operational overhead, Oakbrook adopted an automated approach to data integration. Fivetran enables the company to centralise and govern data from multiple sources, supporting an open data infrastructure model in which data remains accessible, consistent, and under Oakbrook’s control.

“Financial services organisations are under pressure to move faster while maintaining strict governance and control over their data,” said Alex Cresswell, Regional Vice President, Northern Europe, Middle East and Africa (NEMEA) at Fivetran + dbt Labs. “An open data infrastructure allows them to do both, by ensuring data is accessible, governed, and usable across systems without adding operational complexity.”

Fivetran now ingests around 5 million rows of data for Oakbrook each month, creating a consistent, governed data layer across the business. This supports improved customer insight, application development, and marketing effectiveness, including the launch of new products such as OakbrookOne, a debt consolidation loan product that has so far enabled more than £50 million in consolidation lending, with customers saving an average of £110 a month and over 40% receiving same-day settlement of their existing debts.

The announcement reflects Fivetran’s continued commitment to helping organizations modernize their data infrastructure, a mission that has expanded through its combination with dbt Labs to deliver an end-to-end platform for trusted data movement and transformation.

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