Oakbrook Finance, founded in 2011, serves near-prime and non-prime borrowers across the UK who fall outside the appetite of mainstream banks. The business has made more than £1.5 billion in loans through three products — Oakbrook Loans, OakbrookAdvance, and OakbrookOne — and currently holds around 140,000 active borrowers. A significant share of applications arrive through price comparison platforms, where Oakbrook's systems must ingest data, run credit models, and return an offer in under 10 seconds.
To manage that pace without growing its data engineering team, Oakbrook deployed Fivetran as the integration layer across its analytics estate. The company says the move recovered approximately three months of build time previously spent constructing and maintaining pipelines, and that the platform now ingests around 5 million rows of data per month.
"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. 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."Ed Ball, Head of Data and Security, Oakbrook Finance
OakbrookOne has facilitated more than £50 million in consolidation lending since launch. Customers using it save an average of £110 a month on existing debt costs, and more than 40 percent receive same-day settlement of their prior debts.
The deployment follows an open data infrastructure model: data remains accessible and governed across Oakbrook's systems rather than locked into a single warehouse or tooling stack. Fivetran pairs with dbt Labs, whose transformation layer processes data downstream.
"Financial services organisations are under pressure to move faster while maintaining strict governance and control over their data. An open data infrastructure allows them to do both, by ensuring data is accessible, governed, and usable across systems without adding operational complexity."Alex Cresswell, Regional Vice President, Northern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Fivetran
Fivetran's enterprise customer list includes OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, and Verizon. Oakbrook Finance is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
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