SocietyOne leveraged the capability of BankStatements to drop their approval timeframes by 80%, from five business days to one day or less.

About SocietyOne:
SocietyOne is a pioneer in the Australian financial industry as the country’s first peer-to-peer lender. Additionally, as Australia’s largest provider of personal loans in the market place sector, and over AUD 600 million lent in 6 years, SocietyOne is a thriving industry leader.

Industry:
 Alternative Finance
Solution: illion BankStatements

From manual to automatic

As with all Australian credit providers, ensuring the business is adhering to responsible lending practices remains a constant priority for SocietyOne.

One of the most pressing elements of responsible lending is ensuring borrowers are applying for appropriate loans which they can reasonably afford to repay.

SocietyOne complies with the National Consumer Credit Protection (NCCP) Act 2009 which holds credit providers responsible to safeguard themselves and protect consumers from adverse industry practices such as predatory lending and borrowers misleading their repayment capacity to secure credit.

As part of their responsible lending strategy, SocietyOne requires applicants to provide their bank statements as a validation point to prove income and verify expenses. This process was manual and required customers to be organised and time efficient in order to close the application process as soon as possible.

The result was elongated approval processes which increased bounce rates during the onboarding process as well as more resources required of SocietyOne to facilitate manual bank statement retrieval, consolidation and review.

“Historically, we would get customers to send us their bank statements from their bank that they would have to either export from online banking or go physically into a bank.” Jonathan Chan, Chief Operating Officer, SocietyOne

A streamlined transition

In order to greatly increase the efficiency of SocietyOne’s bank statement retrieval and review process, illion provided their digital platform: BankStatements.

BankStatements is a simplified, frictionless solution for customers to make their bank statement data available to lenders using their mobile phone or laptop. By making the process digital and mobile friendly the streamlined customer journey makes the process incredibly quick for both customers and brokers, greatly reducing the number of days required to retrieve, deliver and process bank statements.

For SocietyOne, the integration of new technology had to be efficient and as minimally invasive as possible, to avoid disruptions. Working with the team at illion provided incredibly quick integration and proved to be very easy to work with throughout the onboarding process.

Shifting up gear

Since employing BankStatements in their lending process, SocietyOne has noted a huge increase in onboarding and retrieval efficiency:

  • Customer experience: 20-second turn around as opposed to the 10 to 15 minutes of logging into online banking, searching, exporting and sending bank statements
  • Credit assessor experience: Income, expenses and debts are efficiently categorised and arranged to allow brokers to intuitively access desired records, greatly increasing the time spent on each applicants review

Taking the bank statement retrieval process online has greatly increased contact and access points for both customers and brokers which have had a huge impact on efficiency.

“Our approval times have dropped by 80% – It used to take an average of five days from a lead to approval. It now takes us on average one business day or less as we have reduced friction both for a customer and our team. Assessment time has also decreased by 30%. It takes about one hour to assess “paper statements”, but only 30-40 minutes for bank statements.” Jonathan Chan, Chief Operating Officer, SocietyOne

Overall, SocietyOne has found illion’s BankStatements to not only have a huge impact on time and resource efficiency but enjoy working with the team of professionals who were cited as friendly and down to earth, responsive and quick and incredibly collaborative.

 

Want to learn more about illion BankStatements and how we can help your business embrace Open Banking? Contact us today.