ALDERLEY EDGE, 20 SEPTEMBER 2021

It’s fair to say that fintech is becoming more and more mainstream, even if people don’t know about or haven’t heard of the term most people are likely to be using one, or more fintech developments in their day to day life. Fintech is no longer seen as a niche within financial services, it’s now becoming more embedded into people's lives changing the way we do finance. 

Innovations in the space are improving people’s access to their money, enabling financial inclusion and saving people time as well as creating a new range of financial products for people. From mobile banking apps and payment solutions to trading and cryptocurrency fintech is a wide ranging term.

As fintech becomes more established you will start to see more collaborations between the big incumbents, such as banks, with fintechs as the Banks start to leverage new technologies and fintech’s leverage large customer bases.

How is Monevo positioned to innovate?

I only joined the Monevo team at the beginning of this year, but have worked in fintech for over 15 years first as a senior developer before moving up to hold several IT director / CTO positions before becoming a COO and most recently MD of another fintech business.

My background is in computer science, I have a degree from Newcastle University in the subject and in my first role as a graduate I was one of the development team that made the Premier League website. Since then I have held several positions in technology and within the fintech space specifically including in lending and comparison and most recently as the MD of a savings and investments company. I’m now CIO at Monevo, looking after the global proposition where I manage the product, data and IT teams that help to drive the business forward.

Monevo is a fintech that specialises in the personal credit space where we utilise a unique technology solution to enable consumers to gain access to credit. It’s an incredibly flexible solution that means we can act as the intermediary, allowing us to match customers who are looking for a loan or credit card with the best solution for their current financial situation. A high percentage of customers are likely to have an application rejected by the bank that they have their current account with, as most people won’t have a perfect credit profile and may be unsure as to where to go next. This is where Monevo comes in and can help.

Monevo’s credit decisioning innovations

Monevo has spent the last six years perfecting our credit decisioning system. We take a customer's application and use a credit reference agency to perform a “soft search” on the customer. Using both our own decisioning rules, lenders policy rules and where applicable lenders decisioning API’s we can provide customers with a set of loan options that are available to them and their unique set of personal circumstances. 

This provides the best possible outcome for the customers and can give them options they may not have been aware of before. Given the flexibility of the Monevo platform this allows us to integrate pretty much any lender onto our panel meaning that we can offer a wide range of products to our customers.

One of our more recent developments to further enhance our decision-making for customers was to implement Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to more accurately predict whether customers would be accepted for a loan with a lender or not. Monevo can build AI models for each lender to accurately predict whether the customer will be accepted for the loan or will be interested in the loan.

This technology helps both the customer and the lenders. It further enhances the results the customer is given by removing products the customer won’t be interested in and also reduces the amount of applications that Monevo could send to a lender if we know that the customer won’t be accepted. This can save the lenders time and money by not having to manage the applications and pay for their own credit pulls to profile the customer.

Another recent development was the introduction of Open Banking to the Monevo platform. This is a valuable tool for lenders to understand in more detail a customer's credit worthiness rather than just relying on a credit report as it can outline spending and saving habits as well. 

Although Open Banking is a very powerful tool I feel it is still somewhat in its infancy when it comes to the UK fintech sector. For example, if a customer agrees for Monevo to connect as an AISP to their bank account to download their transaction history, we may not be able to share the customer's transaction and banking details with another AISP even though the customer has given their consent for the information to be shared. In these cases Open Banking data will need to be pulled again for the customer. Despite these current limitations, I have every confidence that it can be further improved over time.

Helping our partners and lenders

As Monevo sits in the middle of the consumer credit space we are uniquely positioned to help partners with their customer acquisition and lenders with their product offerings. We can help partners who introduce customers to Monevo to optimise their marketing and acquisition channels to help them more accurately target prospective customers. 

For lenders we can anonymously compare their products and outcomes with their cohorts and make suggestions as to where they can make adjustments to existing products or release new products to improve their offer rates and make them more attractive to prospective customers.

What’s next?

To stay ahead of the competition we are constantly innovating and enhancing our offerings. Over the past few years we have seen a movement to most customers now using mobile phones as their primary device to browse the internet. Subsequently, we have a new application form that is currently being tested that provides a mobile-first optimised journey for customers, making it as easy as possible to apply for a credit product. 

With just a few clicks customers will be able to apply for a loan through our application forms, speeding up the process and enhancing the customer experience. We are also rolling out upgrades to our technology in Poland which we see as an up and coming market opportunity.

We will also be rolling out a new product set to our UK platform over the next few months, further enhancing our proposition and providing further opportunities for our partners.