One of the most complex aspects of facilitating a personal credit marketplace is having to integrate lenders onto Monevo’s platform, allowing them to distribute their products to highly qualified customers without any issues. 

When you have multiple lenders with different systems, who all want to be integrated in the same way, it can throw up a lot of challenges that need to be solved in a short space of time. That is why Monevo relies on a pool of talented individuals who focus solely on integrations and decisioning, working effectively with lenders to reduce errors and ensure consistency throughout the onboarding process.

Monevo’s Integrations and Decisioning Lead is Tim Rutter, who has been involved in the finance industry, in various guises, for more than 15 years. Among his many exploits, Tim has managed integrations into nearly 150 of the world’s leading financial institutions and written software used by Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Citigroup and Credit Suisse. This accomplished career has led him to being an integral part of Monevo, based at our UK headquarters in Cheshire.

Meet Tim, Integrations and Decisioning Lead

Tim Rutter has been with Monevo for over 3 years, but his career stretches back over 15 years, working in agile technology teams at all ends of the product lifecycle from developer, to UX designer, analyst, team lead and commercial product owner. 

Tim has a passion for data, with a degree specialising in AI and machine learning and later running a BI and data science team. He has used these skills to design and develop automated decision engines connected with leading credit and data agencies such as TransUnion, Equifax and AccountScore. 

The integrations he has managed are for the world’s leading financial institutions, including Barclays, Santander, Goldman Sachs, Ratesetter and VWFS, meaning that he has a huge amount of experience in this space that ensures a smooth process from start to finish.

For Monevo, he operates in a much more hands-on way, working to optimise the integration process in an effort to root out problems and fix them at the source. However, this isn’t always straightforward, especially with lenders using different systems and operating in different ways. This means that each integration potentially poses a different set of challenges to the last.

Every integration is different

One of the biggest challenges that Tim faces is to work with different lenders who operate different systems wanting the same outcome. Monevo’s goal is to make our platform work for every single lender and therefore, every single customer.

The differences between integrations can often be down to location. Monevo currently operates in 4 different territories; namely the UK, US, Poland and Australia. Each territory has different regulations that need to be adhered to, especially when it comes to the handling of data and financial conduct. There is also the consideration of how established the lender market is, which can have an effect on how quickly the integration is processed.

Thankfully, Tim has had experience in completing integrations for financial institutions all over the world, which means he can identify specific issues ahead of time and compensate for them. This experience has meant that we have never failed to get a lender integrated, resulting in a 100% success rate for lender integrations. Part of this success can be attributed to standardising and simplifying the process.

Standardise and simplify

Since we have the constant challenge of unique integrations, one efficient way to combat errors or issues that arise is to standardise and simplify the framework we use. 

Tim has found success in harnessing automation to improve the turnaround of integrations, which also has the added benefit of reducing overall errors. The goal here is to solve issues before getting to the end goal, but in general, Tim has to remain flexible in his approach so that he can continue to evolve with each integration he manages.

Much of the process includes converting data sets, which can lead to vital information being lost in translation. Alongside the standardisation of our framework, it’s also important to be as transparent with lenders as possible, keeping communication channels open in an effort to weed out any potential problems. Whilst this is constantly improving with every integration, it doesn’t account for external factors having an impact on our processes.

One way that Tim found to assist lenders and optimise integrations in one fell swoop was to provide an example specification. This was subsequently used by 5 lenders who have gone on to build APIs using this template, making the process simpler and more streamlined in each instance.

This level of support comes as standard when partnering with Monevo, with experts like Tim leading the way by sharing best practice specifications, meaning that we can not only deliver a successful integration, but also pay this knowledge forward to future partners.

Another layer of complexity

We’ve already seen that the pandemic has had an effect on most, if not all UK industries, with the lending market suffering from lower volumes throughout 2020 and into 2021 with a lengthy period of recovery stretching into 2022. This had a knock-on effect for integrations in how we view customers, as we had to factor in what job or field a person worked in when they were applying for credit. 

The challenge for Tim was to take this additional layer of complexity and make it as simple as possible for lenders. His way of combating this issue was to utilise the ABI list, making this data more accessible for partners and continuing his efforts of simplifying the integration process. Managing complex data sets and retaining transparency is all part of the balancing act that goes into Tim’s role, but one he successfully navigated during this period.

Optimised Integrations

Despite the challenges of different systems used by lenders and external factors affecting his processes, Tim has been able to refine how he manages integrations and move towards a more efficient and optimised workflow.

Ultimately, the goal for him is to build more and more automated processes so that things get simpler and there are less and less errors over time. Standardisation and transparency when it comes to managing data sets is a constantly evolving effort that Tim undertakes, ensuring that he continues to be a vital member of the Monevo team.

To learn more about how Monevo can add value to your business, get in touch using partnerships@monevo.com.