CLIENT OVERVIEW

Grenke

Grenke is a multinational financial services company and one of Europe’s leading providers of small-ticket leasing and financing for business equipment. Operating across dozens of markets, Grenke specializes in providing fast, accessible financing to small and mid-sized businesses acquiring essential operational equipment.

The company’s core verticals include medical equipment, sports equipment, and office equipment, serving merchants and vendors who sell high-consideration, high-ticket items where financing directly impacts conversion. Grenke’s strength lies in its ability to deliver rapid credit decisions for qualified applicants, but like most institutional lenders, its internal resources are most valuable when focused on applicants who are genuinely creditworthy and likely to convert.

THE CHALLENGE

High-Volume Application Noise Consuming Underwriting Resources

Grenke’s vendor network spans multiple industries and e-commerce platforms. Before integrating with Sharpei, the volume of incoming financing applications was high, but the quality was inconsistent. Unqualified applicants, those who would never pass Grenke’s credit criteria, were entering the pipeline at the same rate as strong candidates.

This created a direct cost problem. Every application that reaches a lender’s underwriting queue consumes resources, whether it’s automated decisioning capacity, manual review time, or compliance checks. When a significant percentage of that volume is destined for decline, the lender is spending money to process applications that will never generate revenue.

On the merchant side, the checkout experience was fragmented. Vendors selling through Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce each had different workflows, and integrating financing into each platform required custom development that most small and mid-sized merchants could not support. The result was a financing option that existed but was not embedded deeply enough into the purchase flow to drive meaningful conversion.

THE SOLUTION

Intelligent Prequalification and Multi-Platform Automation

Sharpei’s integration with Grenke operates at two levels: upstream prequalification that protects lender resources, and downstream e-commerce automation that removes friction from merchant operations.

API Integration with Grenke’s Lending Systems. As an official technology partner, Sharpei maintains a direct API connection to Grenke’s lending infrastructure. This is not a referral arrangement or a lead-generation layer. Application data flows directly between systems, enabling real-time communication between the point of sale and the lender’s credit decisioning engine.

Prequalification Layer: 90% Noise Reduction. Before any application reaches Grenke, it passes through Sharpei’s prequalification engine. This layer evaluates applicants against defined credit criteria and filters out those who do not meet minimum qualification thresholds. The result is decisive: 90% of unqualified applicants are removed before they ever touch Grenke’s systems. Only prequalified, lender-ready applications are transmitted.

Automatic Approvals for Qualified Applicants. For applicants who pass prequalification, the integration enables automatic credit approval through Grenke’s systems. This eliminates the waiting period that traditionally separates application from decision, converting what was once a multi-step, multi-day process into a near-instantaneous experience at checkout.

Multi-Platform E-Commerce Automation. Upon approval, Sharpei automatically creates a corresponding order in the merchant’s e-commerce platform, whether that is Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce. This multi-platform capability means Grenke’s vendor network is not constrained by which commerce system a given merchant uses. The automation is consistent across all three.

THE RESULTS

Lender Efficiency, Merchant Conversion, Operational Scale

The 90% prequalification filter fundamentally changed Grenke’s unit economics on application processing. Instead of allocating underwriting capacity to a pipeline where a majority of applicants would be declined, Grenke now receives a curated pipeline where the vast majority of applicants meet credit criteria. This means higher approval rates on submitted applications, lower cost per funded deal, and a significantly more efficient use of internal resources.

For merchants across medical, sports, and office equipment verticals, the integration removed a persistent source of checkout friction. Financing is now embedded in the purchase flow, applications are resolved in real time, and approved orders appear automatically in whichever e-commerce platform the merchant operates on. No manual data entry, no platform-specific workarounds, no fulfillment delays.

WHY IT WORKED

The Prequalification Advantage in Institutional Lending

The core insight behind this integration is simple but powerful: lenders should not be spending resources on applicants who were never going to qualify. The prequalification layer Sharpei provides acts as a strategic filter that aligns application volume with lender capacity, ensuring that every application that reaches Grenke is worth evaluating.

This is especially valuable for institutional lenders like Grenke who operate at scale across multiple verticals and geographies. Without prequalification, scaling merchant volume means proportionally scaling the processing of unqualified applications. With Sharpei’s prequalification layer in place, Grenke can scale its vendor network aggressively without proportionally increasing underwriting workload.

The multi-platform automation layer amplifies this advantage. By supporting Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce natively, Sharpei removes the technical barrier that previously limited which merchants could offer Grenke financing. Any vendor on any of these three platforms can now be activated as a Grenke financing channel with minimal integration effort.

“The best application a lender never sees is the one that was never going to qualify. Sharpei’s prequalification layer ensures Grenke’s underwriting team only evaluates applicants worth evaluating.”

— Sharpei AI Partner Integration Framework

CONCLUSION

The Grenke partnership illustrates the strategic value of positioning an intelligent prequalification layer between the merchant’s point of sale and the lender’s credit decisioning systems. By filtering 90% of unqualified applicants, automating approvals for qualified ones, and creating orders automatically across three major e-commerce platforms, Sharpei has enabled Grenke to scale merchant financing programs with dramatically lower operational overhead and higher approval quality. For any lender seeking to expand vendor-channel origination without diluting underwriting efficiency, this integration model offers a proven, replicable blueprint.