A large B2B Specialist: Cutting Finance Approval Times to Accelerate Sales

Challenge

A leading UK B2B finance provider was striving to make its customers’ lives easier by reducing the lengthy credit approval times they had to endure. Accelerating the process was key for this company as they manage nearly 80,000 commercial finance contracts in the UK with transactions worth from £1,000 to £50 million.

Business customers needed a self-serve experience. Our client had the proprietary technology with the logic to allow this, but not a user friendly way to use it. The vast majority of finance deals were carried out by the sales team - only 12% were loaded into the system directly by customers.

As well as improving the customer experience, they wanted to tackle the complexity, lack of flexibility and speed of access to credit decisions whilst the sales team were out in the field. The business requirement was to streamline and digitally transform the entire sales process to boost efficiency, increase market penetration and grow both services and company revenue.

Solution

Using our rapid prototyping expertise and embracing a truly collaborative process with the client, we co-created a prototype in a single week. We then launched an MVP to 10 pilot introducers (vendors and brokers) and internal sales teams initially offering a basic functionality of proposing a deal and receiving an automated credit decision. Feedback from those early adopters was used to shape its ongoing development and direction.

Following highly positive feedback from stakeholders and introducers alike, we progressed into the build and iteratively developed the go-to-market product. It  linked into the client’s core systems for automated credit approvals and ran on AWS utilising EC2, CloudFront & S3 services.

The result was a highly personalised customer app providing 1 minute results on simple financial agreements and allowing customers to  make applications and get approval on the go. The solution transformed the entire sales process – from onboarding to contract signature. It also enabled staff to focus on more complex higher value deals and no longer spend time on unnecessary tasks.