Financial Sector Archives - Arrk Group

Becoming Customer Centric – the Secret to Financial Services Success

Drashya Kuruwa — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 14:48:02 +0000

Becoming Customer Centric - the Secret to Financial Services Success

By Team Arrk	Thought Leadership
4 mins read

For anyone who may have been oblivious to it before, hopefully the widely publicised recent demise of Thomas Cook highlights that you can’t run an analogue business model in a digital world. Due to cutthroat competition and new market entrants, especially when it’s difficult to differentiate yourself through your service offering, if you don’t provide customers with what they need and how they want to consume it, you’ll be left in the dark ages. Thomas Cook paid the ultimate price for not adapting their business model to the changing ways of the modern holidaymaker.

At the other end of the spectrum, only this week, Starling Bank announced it is moving beyond the mobile to add an online banking option for its 66,000 business and sole trader account customers, with the online option extended to personal and joint account holders at a later date. All of this as a reaction to their customers demanding even more flexibility to bank the way that best suits them. Some may see this as a backward step, however, if they are giving their customers exactly what they need they will dramatically reduce the risk of losing them to a competitor and potentially entice others to them.

The finance market is as tough as you get, and in order to gain that competitive edge and win more business, it is imperative that you need to enrich your customer experience for both new and existing customers. To this end, the role of the CRM has never been more important. However, for many organisations it probably won’t be an out of the box solution or the time served platform you started off with which has now had its day, that will drive your business forward. Nor should be seen purely as a sales and marketing tool (which It can be very good at) but rather it needs to embrace the whole organisations and be able to deliver a single customer view across all departments.

Having a smooth and speedy application process is a given nowadays, but this can only truly occur with intelligent integration to help the decision-making process go above and beyond the information that is directly provided. Combine this with effective compliance around regulations, such as identifying and assessing vulnerability and using trended data to support predictive analytics to make customers aware of potential issues before they recognises it themselves, it’s easy to see how effective customer data management is essential to provide you with the insight to make the right business decisions.

When combined with self-service portals (for customers, suppliers or referral/broker partners), you can also provide the ability to quickly access and receive information without direct involvement from your business. Your website, mobile app, customer portal, and physical location should all be in-sync with one another which aligns with new expectations for companies to provide a streamlined experience across all channels. And all of this is driven by real-time information held within your CRM. When portals are planned and implemented appropriately, they have a positive impact on your organisation’s productivity and customer satisfaction. A good self-service portal delivers tangible benefits to service desks, end users and the business as a whole.

However, new systems do come at a cost and the reality of business today (and everyday) is that there is continuous pressure to deliver more services at a lower cost. This results in companies often being forced to make difficult judgements about where to spend their budgets. Projects become delayed or even cancelled because of the initial cost of deployment, or requirements are stripped back to meet a specific budget. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Find out where you currently stand with our Financial Services CRM Maturity Assessment which has been designed to help organisations unlock the existing hidden potential by providing a comprehensive audit of your current CRM capabilities. Or, alternative through our CRM CheckmArrk™ service, we can undertake a more detailed independent review of your system, reporting back across our Five Point Model, identifying quick win system or process improvements that will deliver immediate business returns and a recommendations plan of how to maximise benefits in the short and long term.

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Premium Digital Solution Accelerates Loan Applications

Richard Lawton — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:12:15 +0000

Premium Credit is owned by Cinven, a leading international private equity firm. Cinven has extensive experience acquiring successful companies and helping them grow and develop.

Arrk Group helped increase Premium Credit’s competitiveness by designing, building and deploying a large-scale, secure digital customer acquisition platform.

The highly scalable digital platform has reduced the time taken to process a loan from weeks to just minutes, which in turn has resulted in an increase in conversions of over 25 percent. Furthermore, the new platform has improved productivity and customer satisfaction, whilst improving the compliance audit trail.

Key Benefits

Reduction of loan application process from weeks to minutes
Over a 25 per cent increase in application-to-loan conversions
Scalable, maintainable and highly flexible digital solution
Joint development team hit all major release dates
Collaborative and efficient working procedures introduced
Full audit trail for all loan and payment transactions

Summary

For over 25 years Premium Credit Limited had used the same loan administration system, which had become increasingly difficult to maintain and expensive to support. Supplied by an American corporation with little or no presence in the UK, it required US-based staff to be engaged locally to provide support. With significant changes occurring within the market place, including changes in technology and legislation, Premium Credit decided to replace its legacy system with a modern alternative.

Following initial strategic advice from Arrk Group, Premium Credit commenced in-house development of a new platform using an Oracle/.Net architecture. However, after two and half years senior management were frustrated and asked Arrk Group to conduct a consultative investigation. As a result of this work, Arrk Group was invited to become Premium Credit’s technology partner.

Challenge

Premium Credit was losing market share to more nimble competitors and needed to replace its core application quickly. A new digital platform was required to address both strategic and tactical requirements, in the case of the former the business needed to improve efficiency and switch to automated processes, while the latter involved incorporating new reference and account number functionality. However, replacing the entire legacy system in a single move would be high risk and involve years of work.

The strategy that Premium Credit and Arrk Group adopted was to first transition Premium Credit’s School Fees business from the legacy system to the new application. The school fees business mirrors the main insurance lending business very closely, and in some cases is more complex. Furthermore, Premium Credit had made a commitment to improve its customer experience to schools in time for the start of the next academic year, only six months after Arrk Group became the development partner.

Solution

Working closely with Premium Credit’s senior management team, Arrk Group established a new programme and project management structure and implemented disciplined, focused design, development, testing and deployment methodologies. The result was the creation of a joint Premium Credit/Arrk software delivery team with Arrk Group people taking up key leadership roles. Discovery workshops involving a diverse range of users and stakeholders were used to rapidly build consensus within Premium Credit, with Arrk Group’s business analysts complementing the existing in-house team of business analysts and testers.

A number of test cases and scenarios were generated from these sessions which in turn shaped the solution’s requirements, determined by business priority. The main development activities were carried out at Arrk Group’s office in India, including build and testing. User acceptance testing and deployment was carried out by a joint, UK based team. Once an application release was ready, in-house system support staff carried out deployment and on-going support.

Outcomes

Despite tight timescales, the initial target to deliver the first release of the application before the start of the academic year was met, as were several subsequent releases and deployment target dates. All in all Arrk Group developed a range of new applications and services using the same platform and architecture all delivered efficiently and on budget. This new functionality included several multi-platform customer self-serve loan application systems that use the latest in e-signature technology and mobile customer engagement tools.

Premium Credit can now rely on a highly efficient and robust digital loans processing platform which has allowed the company to become extremely competitive. Arrk Group has also introduced to Premium Credit a new approach to software development, one which encompasses the latest practices and technology and allows for the rapid, flexible, cost effective development and deployment of new applications.

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