How We Helped SME Capital Streamline Their Loan Application Process
SME Capital
SME Capital was founded to support the growing number of SMEs who face difficulty or frustration in accessing capital through traditional methods. SME Capital works with businesses who may not be able to access lending either through traditional lenders or online lenders that rely on automated application processes.
The Problem
SME Capital wanted to change its business model from one focused on peer-to-peer lending to one providing funding sourced from Asset Managers.
Its lending platform, designed to support the original business model, needed a major redevelopment to support the new business requirements. The platform would also have to allow much greater self-service capabilities. While making the transition to the new model, SME Capital needed the platform to support the existing business.
SME Capital had an in-house technology team but was not clear on how the transition could be made in a cost-effective and low-risk way. SME Capital therefore needed a technology partner that could be trusted to help them plan and execute their roadmap to a transformed lending platform.
Why Evolved Ideas?
SME Capital became aware of Evolved Ideas through work that Evolved Ideas had done for another client. This gave SME Capital enough confidence to approach Evolved Ideas about potentially supporting SME Capital on its technology transformation.
Evolved Ideas had proven experience of working with Financial Services companies and was able to support SME Capital across the complete lifecycle of the transformation, from initial planning to design, build, and run.
The Solution
Evolved Ideas began its engagement with SME Capital with a series of workshops with stakeholders across the business to ensure that the business’s objectives were clearly understood, and that the technology solution would be fully aligned with these objectives.
The next step was for Evolved Ideas to recruit and manage a team of technical experts to carry out the design and development of the new platform.
As part of its design work Evolved Ideas created a comprehensive roadmap to the new platform and then executed this roadmap in close collaboration with business subject matter experts. Prior to Evolved Ideas involvement development of the platform had been technology-led, and Evolved Ideas wanted to ensure that the alignment with the business that had been created at the start of the project was maintained.
A key stage in the project was for Evolved Ideas to carry out an assessment of the existing lending platform to understand the changes that would be required in order to support the new business model, and to identify any operational risks that could arise in the transition to the new model.
SME Capital had made some changes to the platform before they realised the scale of the work required to transition to the new model. When Evolved Ideas assessed the platform they identified that some of the changes had introduced some instabilities.
Therefore, before embarking on the transformation, Evolved Ideas had to first stabilise the platform. It did this by refactoring it on AWS, modernising the architecture to improve both stability and scalability.
SME Capital also had urgent challenges with reporting, so Evolved Ideas designed and built a new reporting solution that integrated with the lending platform, and which was integrated into SME Capital’s business processes.
With the existing platform stabilised, and reporting needs met, Evolved Ideas then built and deployed the new lending platform.
Results
Working with Evolved Ideas, SME Capital was able to:
- Improve the stability and scalability of its lending platform
- Achieve improved visibility and control through a new reporting platform
- Transition to a lending platform that fully supported its new business model
- Create and launch a new suite of credit risk tools to support its lending decisions
- Reduce the manual effort and therefore costs associated with managing new lending deals
- Further reduce costs by being able to set up a nearshore credit management team, something that would not have been possible with the existing platform.
Testimonial
"We started working with Evolved Ideas more than 2 years ago, when we needed to start redeveloping our SME Loan Platform to meet the growing and ever-changing demands of borrowers.The team at Evolved Ideas are like part of the business, they understand what we do and they understand what we need before we realise we need it!"
Kate Kennedy CEO SME Capital