What is open banking?

The most straightforward definition of open banking is that it is a process whereby banks and other financial institutions open up customer data to be shared with third-parties. However, it’s a lot safer than it sounds, and there’s a lot more to it than that.

Within the lending industry, open banking technology gives lenders the ability to view the bank statements of applicants and customers in real time with the use of an API that connects lenders to banks. In doing this, open bankings gives lenders a lightning-fast, exceedingly secure method of retrieving customer banking data.

The real goal of incorporating open banking into your business should be to assist with creating a more efficient workflow. With open banking, you open up your services to seriously impressive automation, eliminating the stress of manual tasks, freeing up your team’s time and saving you money.

Is open banking safe?

Yes, open banking is safe, for both businesses and customers, even if the idea of opening up customer data to third parties can sound a little scary for potential customers. Fortunately, customers and applicants have nothing to worry about.

The only data you can access through open banking as a business is the data necessary for the service that the customer has registered for. For instance, you may only need to see outgoings from a current account, or the amount of credit card debt a customer has incurred, with open banking, that’s the only data you have access to. Plus, with GDPR, customer data is better protected than ever before. 

How does an open banking API work?

Now you know what open banking is, and that it’s perfectly safe to offer to your customers, we’ll look into how exactly the technology works. There’s many ways to use an open banking API, but we think they work fantastically in the lending sector.

When tied into a decision engine – such as our LendTech platform – an open banking API can scan customer bank statements in real time. The open banking platform then feeds the information into the decision engine where it is matched against parameters set by the owner of the engine to determine whether or not a loan should be offered.

In the above scenario, open banking would be a driving force in the automation of the entire lending and underwriting process, which is great news for anyone in the industry. When utilised effectively, open banking APIs can bring huge gains to businesses, speeding up processes and allowing teams to focus on essential manual tasks.

Getting started with an open banking platform

Open banking is a revolutionary technology that is making waves across the finance industry. With automations becoming more and more common, it’s important to stay ahead of the competition, and working an open banking platform into your business is one way to do just that. But how do you use open banking for your business?

Here at Venture Motion, we strive to make access to automations in the lending industry accessible to anyone. We built our LendTech platform with you in mind, and getting started is as simple as filling in the form below to start building your solution. You’ll have access to open banking, custom form builders, Companies House checks and more, with automated loan approvals just around the corner.

What is a decision engine?

For more information on how decision engines work, you can read our in-depth guide to how our own decision engine works.

How credit decision engines boost your performance

The main appeal of working a decision engine into your existing systems is the incredible performance boost that automation consistently brings. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the lending sector, with credit decision engines consistently boosting the performance of businesses by automating existing lending qualifications and workflows.

Our decision engine platform integrates with business credit data sources in real time to make custom logic-based decisions automatically. This gives businesses the power to close deals faster and scale their organisation without having to increase their headcount or ongoing costs.

Credit decision engines interlink with credit databases such as Creditsafe to provide access to incredibly valuable data. With access to business credit references, the decision engine can accurately assess the financial health and stability of a business, guaranteeing that any necessary criteria is being met. 

From entry-level credit decision engine software to a fully customisable, purpose-built decision engine platform, your credit-focused business will always benefit from even minor automations. However, it’s only with the truly bespoke and specialised platforms that your business can gain the most benefit.

A fully customisable decision engine platform gives businesses full control and freedom over the parameters used to approve or deny applicants for their services, all through the power of automation. Most lending businesses, in particular, can have quite complex criteria as part of the credit decisioning process. As such, ensuring you’re using the right lending decision engine is essential if you want to elevate your business with automations. This brings us to SalesTech, our own custom-built decision engine platform.

SalesTech: The Venture Motion Decision Engine

What data does the Companies House API provide?

The public information available through the Companies House API is valued at over three billion pounds, so it should come as no surprise that the data available to you once you’re using the API is incredibly wide-ranging. The full list of data available can be found the Companies House website but, in summary, the main areas of data you can access through the API are:

• Company information data
• Company filing data
• Insolvency cases data
• Charges data
• Officers data
• PSC data

Within each of those categories, there are even more subcategories, ensuring that there’ll be data that you can utilise in some way. No matter what your business offers, having on-the-fly access to Companies House data through the API is guaranteed to benefit the running of your business.

How Companies House data can benefit your business

With access to the wide range of useful data that the Companies House API offers, your KYC process can be dramatically enhanced. With billions of pounds worth of company data just a click away and fully accessible in real-time, you can make decisions in regards to other companies far more efficiently.

The kind of data available through the Companies House API often underpins lending decisions, meaning that the time taken for the underwriting process can be rapidly accelerated. Within seconds, you’ll be able to make decisions based entirely on up-to-date, accurate information.

The Companies House API lets you go one step further, however. Once you’ve started using it, we can link the solution into our LendTech Decision Engine, bringing even more benefits to your business offerings.

How the Companies House API integrates with the LendTech Decision Engine

As a part of our LendTech suite of solutions, when we integrate the Companies House API into a business’ internal systems, we always aim to integrate it into our Decision Engine too. In doing so, we allow our clients to really make the most of the API’s power, entirely eliminating the usual time and effort required when underwriting B2B customers.

Once integrated with our LendTech Decision Engine, the Companies House API really comes into its own. Utilising the same data you have access too with the standalone API, our Decision Engine processes the data based on your custom criteria, scoring, approving or rejecting applicants in seconds.

You decide the criteria required. Whether you want to retain manual approvals only for those customers who hit a minimum score based on your requirements, or if you want to hand full approval power over to the Decision Engine, the choice is yours. However you decide to utilise it, once you integrate the Companies House API with the LendTech Decision Engine, your entire B2B offering will be upgraded to entirely new heights.

To unlock the potential of the Companies House API in your business, start building your solution today.

Delivering a consistent customer experience with automations

You can have great marketing and offer the customer a brilliant service up to the point of delivery, but if the service delivery doesn’t match up to their expectations, that will reflect negatively on your entire business offering. The answer? Ensuring that customers have a consistent experience with your business from the moment they first make contact with your business.

By guaranteeing a consistently high quality service to your customers from their first interaction with your business through to product delivery, you are guaranteed to leave a lasting impression. Today’s customers want to feel cared for and communicated with at every stage of their buying journey, but they may interact with multiple staff members and departments before they purchase your service.

With a range of different people and departments to go through before the sale is actually made, consistent communication with the lead can be almost impossible to guarantee manually. However, when automations are utilised within the customer journey, consistency can be delivered to every lead, every time.

Automations can range from automated communications with existing leads through to entirely automated lead enhancement and scoring to save your team time and resources. Whatever your business needs, you can automate the customer journey from beginning to end.

Automations to enhance the human element

Introducing automations into the customer journey doesn’t mean that you’re removing the human element. Instead, it will be enhanced. The human interactions leads have when engaging with your business are guaranteed to be inconsistent at some point or another. This can leave high-standard customers feeling at least a little let down by either the sales process or the service delivery.

When automations are utilised in tandem with great human customer service, the customer is getting the best of both worlds. For instance, in the FinTech sector, our own finance automations enhance every lead before they even hit the CRM. Before any human interaction occurs, a finance automation platform can assess whether the lead would be eligible for the product, assigning them a score that can then be utilised by your staff. 

Freeing up staff time in this manner slims down the amount of departments the lead has to go through to make a purchase, making the application process far more efficient for the applicant. Meanwhile, by reducing the amount of time required for staff to process applications, a more consistent level of communication between the lead and your company is able to take place.

But it’s not just finance automations. No matter the industry you’re in, an experienced automation and integration agency can build and implement features that are guaranteed to improve the customer journey from both the client and business perspectives.

How to integrate automations that enhance the customer journey

The kinds of automations that we’ve discussed in this article can be hugely beneficial to almost any business. From streamlining the lead scoring process, to simply providing customers with a consistently high-quality offering between the sale and service delivery, automations are the single best way to enhance the customer experience.

To understand just how valuable automations could be for your business, get in touch with our team of experts today. We’ll guide you through exactly what kinds of automations would be suited to your business, while building a bespoke solution to elevate your customer experience to the next level.

Setting up the LendTech decision engine

Our decision engine utilises a range of custom-built modules to automate your underwriting. Linking the engine in with your existing business processes couldn’t be easier. We’ll set up our intelligent custom forms, open banking and bespoke integrations to operate within custom criteria set by you.

You’ll have full control over which modules are utilised to ensure that they fit with your business aims and existing underwriting systems. Once integrated by our team of experts, our modules give an overview of the validity of every applicant.

Where we get our data from

Our LendTech technology uses data pulled from a variety of sources in real time to inform our decision engine. Within the B2B space, our modules dive into the Companies House API to retrieve company information, filing history and director and insolvency data.

For more general purposes, LendTech taps into major credit checking agencies such as Equifax, Experian and Credit Safe to pull in real time data on applicants. From credit scores, anti-money laundering information, identity verification, income data and more, LendTech builds a full profile of the applicant in seconds. 

Even bank statements can be automatically checked and assessed in real time using LendTech’s open banking module. Whatever the information you require to make an informed lending decision, LendTech can work with it. 

The approval process

With our LendTech modules fully integrated into your business and running, we will automatically apply your custom criteria to every applicant. Within seconds, our decision engine will have assigned them an eligibility score or outcome that you set.

Once we’ve worked together to determine a minimum score for approval, our automatically generated eligibility reports will be integrated into your systems. You’ll be able to approve or deny any applicant without having to lift a finger.

Get in touch with us today to discover how impactful the LendTech decision engine can be for your business.

Credit checking APIs

Integrating credit checking technology into your business is the most obvious way to give you the ability to perform customer credit checks. Credit checking APIs are supplied directly from major credit agencies like Experian, Equifax and Credit Safe, allowing your business to make the use of the power and services of some of the world’s largest credit checking companies.

But what is actually involved in the customer credit check process when you’re using a credit checking API? Once you have the licence to use a credit agency’s API, the process is quite straightforward, but will require some technical know-how.

For the most efficient credit checks possible you’ll want to fully integrate the API of your choice into your existing business processes. This will allow you to quickly stream the credit checking data into your systems, workflows and products, giving you access to a raft of data to benefit your sales, marketing, credit, risk and compliance solutions.

To discover more about credit checking API integration, you can check out our API integration services and get in touch with our team of automation experts.

Other ways to check customer credit 

Customer credit approval doesn’t always have to involve the incorporation of a major credit checking company. In fact there are a multitude of methods to approve applicants for your financial services. 

Creating custom forms built around the services that you offer is a great way to filter out applicants to only the ones you’re most likely to approve. Combine this with real-time access to applicant bank statements with Open Banking technology and you’ll be on track to offering an incredibly streamlined customer credit checking process.

With our LendTech platform, you can integrate all of this technology (and more) into your business. We build revenue-driving automations and integrations for all types of finance business, so whatever technological improvements your business needs, get in touch with Venture Motion to find out how we can help.

The power of automation in alternative finance

For many lenders and brokers, one of the primary factors inhibiting growth within the alternative finance industry is the slow adoption cutting edge technology. For many lenders, the main issues holding back the expansion of their service is the sheer amount of tasks they need to perform, leaving them unable to process the number of applications they could be receiving due to a lack of resources or manpower.

This is where automation comes in. Automation in alternative finance eliminates many of the primary issues holding back financial firms from growth. Manual underwriting, assessing applicant bank statement and performing manual credit checks through credit files and Companies House all take up substantial time and resources, and can all be streamlined with the use of automation.

Here are some of our tips for relieving the stress of your alternative lending business.

Take your forms onto the cloud

With custom online forms built to your specifications you can begin automating your KYC process from the moment an applicant first applies for funding. Your site may already make use of online forms built and placed using a CMS plugin, but by investing in fully customised cloud-based forms, you can achieve so much more with your forms.

With custom forms you can determine the exact parameters you need to begin the KYC process from the word go. Ensuring all applicant data is securely stored in the cloud – where it can then be processed by the rest of your application process – is also essential for modern alternative finance companies, removing every aspect of the hassle associated with paper applications. 

Enhance your applications with external data 

Using automations that pull information from external data sources allows you to enhance, validate and score new clients and applicants before you even need to pass the data onto your underwriting team. Whether you get your data from credit checkers like Experian, Equifax or Creditsafe, or if you offer business loans based on Companies House data, custom automations can benefit your business.

Once the automations are set up, data cross referencing checks can take seconds. You’ll see a dramatic reduction in the time it takes to process applications, cutting out hours of time to ensure your underwriting team can focus on more important tasks.

Use open banking to connect to applicant bank accounts

Many alternative finance companies still rely on applicants sending in paper bank statements, to be manually filed on arrival. There are two main issues you’re likely to face if your business relies on the submission of paper statements.

Firstly, the filing process will be time consuming and has a high degree of error. Of course, the time and resources required to manually file hundreds, if not thousands, of submitted documents could cause significant issues if you’re trying to grow your business. Secondly, it is simply not very appealing to potential applicants, who are much more likely to apply if the process for doing so is simplified and digital.

Open banking is, without a doubt, the best solution to this issue. With an open banking API, lending businesses are able to connect directly with a customer’s bank account with next to no effort from either the lender or the applicant. The efficiency of open banking systems also extends to later automations, with customer data available to review remotely, either manually or by an automated system, in real time.

Bring your document uploads into the 21st century

While open banking is great for collecting bank statements, your loan application process may require other documents from applicants. Whether you need applicant ID, proof of address, visas and immigration documents or any other user-supplied document as part of your loan approval process ensuring that you use a cloud-based document upload service will bolster your business.

Rather than accepting physical scans of the necessary applicant documents, open a cloud-based online channel to receive them. You’ll have access to much clearer customer data that can be easily accessed and retrieved whenever necessary. Plus, you’ll have a system poised to seamlessly integrate and automate other aspects of your application system.

Automate the entire decision making process

By automating multiple steps in your loan application process, you’ll be able to use advanced automations to all but eliminate the most time consuming aspect of any loan approval – the underwriting. Underwriting is time consuming, often requiring a lot of manpower too.

Utilising automations throughout the application process and feeding customer data into a decision engine means that you’ll be able to automate the entire loan decision process. By using automations bespoke to your business, you can be certain that only the criteria you decide on is assessed, while entirely removing the possibility of human error.

By saving you huge amounts of time, money and resources, automating underwriting and decision making doesn’t just guarantee you a watertight approval system, it also helps your business to grow.

How to automate your alternative finance business

Automations have the capability to save alternative finance companies huge amounts of time and money, opening them up to more opportunities and helping the market to grow even larger. With the finance industry moving into a more digital space across the board, we can expect widespread digitisation and automation within all areas of the lending industry.

To start your journey towards a digital and automated future for your finance business, get in touch with our team today. We offer expert automations for the alternative finance sector, bringing your business into the future.