Buyline believes that all businesses should transact on a level playing field and be able to offer their customers the same advantages as their larger rivals.
Having started in the dental and aesthetics space offering short, medium and long-term point-of-sale finance options, Buyline have grown to encompass a wide range of sectors from retail to healthcare, to education and more, all the while staying focused on their mission: removing the barriers to retail finance for SMEs.
The challenge
In an effort to help support their business partners, Buyline try to say ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’ and to that end have purposefully not had any ‘auto-decline’ rules built into their decisioning. While a hugely positive and refreshing mantra in the lending industry, this approach has regularly led to high volumes of decisioning resting squarely on the shoulders of their underwriters, in addition to an onus on customers to manually collect and upload months of bank statement data per application when required.
Huw Phillips, CEO of Buyline wanted to change this. After seeing his team of underwriters repeatedly entrenched in reams of paper, taking up to 15-20 minutes per decision, he tasked himself with finding a more modern, efficient way to support their work while also improving the customer journey.
The solution
After researching the market, Huw came across LendingMetrics’ OpenBankVision. A revolutionary platform that allows companies to access up to a year’s worth of enhanced, categorised bank statement data in real-time, providing them with the clearest picture possible of a customer’s affordability.
OBV dramatically reduces our underwriting times and the impact on our customers and business partners.
Following implementation, Huw and his team were able to reduce their average decision time from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. Providing a huge boost in efficiency and a lessening of overall pressure on the team.
Customers using OBV no longer need to gather and upload bank statements; a task which constantly ran the risk of the team being provided with incorrect or incomplete information. They simply choose to allow access to their chosen accounts through a secure Open Banking process provided by OBV.
A huge win-win for Huw and his team.
The fact that the team at Buyline now have access to full statement data gives them the confidence that they are dealing with ‘solid’ data, eliminating ‘guesswork’ and the risk of manual calculation error all the while increasing data security by the simple fact that no physical statements need to be handled.
The future
With more consumers becoming used to Open Banking, it’s made adoption and use of an Open Banking product even more effective. So much so, that the team at Buyline have seen an impressive hit rate (customers who complete the journey) of 60% since implementing OBV.
In addition, the increased quality of the data has allowed the team to ensure the right customer outcomes are achieved across the board; from straightforward applications to more complicated edge cases.
In the future, Buyline intends to bring OBV closer to their regular process by integrating it into their automatic customer journey as well as building an integration to The LendingMetrics Exchange - further strengthening the quality and reach of their customer data as they continue on their path as the ‘champion of the SME’.
