DLA: Welcome to the DLA! Please tell us why you guys founded DFKP?
Paul Weber: Growing up as the son of a printing company owner, I experienced early on the challenges that small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) face in their day-to-day operations – especially when it comes to financing. Finding suitable credit solutions was often difficult, the process complicated, and frequently frustrating. When I founded Deutsche Firmenkredit Partner (DFKP), I wanted to address this very issue: making it easier for SME to access financing.
DLA: What exactly is the business model of your company?
Paul Weber: DFKP is a digital, bank-independent financing platform that connects SME in Germany with the most suitable funding solutions from a broad network of over 200 financing partners. While we offer the best service for entrepreneurs to find suitable financing quickly and effortlessly, we help banks and financiers by minimizing their process costs and maximizing their conversion rates in new customer acquisition.
DLA: Why was it important for you to become a member of our trade body?
Paul Weber: For us at DFKP, joining the DLA is about more than industry alignment, it’s about actively shaping the future of SME financing in Europe. As a technology-driven intermediary with a strong advisory component, we operate daily at the intersection of lenders, regulators, and entrepreneurs. We believe that digital credit needs a strong voice, a shared infrastructure, and credible standards. The DLA provides exactly that and we want to be a contributing part of it.
DLA: Where do you see the greatest added value for DLA and its members resulting from the new membership of DFKP?
Paul Weber: DFKP brings the perspective of a neutral platform that works with over 200 partners, from commercial banks to NBDLs and public development institutions. Our insights from thousands of SME financing cases per year help identify what works and what still doesn’t in the digital credit process. We contribute scalable technology, e.g. Open Banking integrations, API-based matching and pre-decisioning, and we’re ready to support the association’s work on initiatives like FIDA, where fair and secure access to SME financial data is key to enabling broader credit inclusion across Europe.
As one of the first platforms in Germany to use Open Banking actively in SME credit pre-screening and feasibility analysis, we understand the operational barriers around data availability, standardization, and reliability. That experience can help shape realistic frameworks within FIDA that reflect the actual complexity of SME lending and ensure that financial data access becomes a true enabler, not just a theoretical promise.
DLA: Thank you very much for the interview, Paul. We are really happy to have DFKP aboard now.
Foto credits:
- Paul Weber: DFKP