SME Lending Platform

A Leading Tier 1 Financial Institution in Portugal required a business and digital transformation programme focused on the corporate customer segment to enhance their business capabilities. The institution faced multiple challenges, including:

• Loss of Opportunities: Low pre-approval rate for loans resulted in missed business opportunities.
• Long Time to Cash: Prolonged decision-making processes hampered competitive agility.
• Time-Consuming Operations: Highly manual processes led to inefficiency and waste.
• Inefficient Data Management: Lack of a 360-degree client vision and outdated technology.
• Legacy Software: Outdated technology infrastructure created performance issues.

To address these challenges, we implemented a comprehensive transformation strategy including:

• Envision Phase: A roadmap for the transformation with specific KPIs to be achieved, aligned with strategic goals.
• Data Enablement: A new data solution to enable an automatic 360-degree client view and automate the credit decision.
• User-Centric Features: Comprehensive dashboards consolidating customer data for better decision-making and automated end-to-end processes.
• Simulation and proposal capabilities: Tools for loan scenario simulations and proposal generation.
• Contracting capabilities: seamless and automatic end-to-end contracting process.
• End-to-end automation: Connection to the core banking and documents management for a seamless contracting process
• Change Management: Engaged stakeholders at all levels to foster engagement and secure buy-in.
• Risk Monitoring Tools: Continuous credit-risk assessment and management.
• Cloud First Architecture: Cloud-based infrastructure, improving performance, scalability, and business agility.

The transformation programme yielded significant benefits:

• 80% of yearly loans approved – significantly increasing new business opportunities.
• 79% reduction in decision-making time - enhancing agility.
• 60% reduction in time to cash – streamlined for a faster hiring time meant quicker access to funds for clients.

Customer Satisfaction: High customer satisfaction, reflecting improved services and processes.

• Microservices/Microfrontend Architecture Cloud and agnostic platform
• Custom angular frontends 
• Spring Boot apps using Java as backend
• Postgres for operations, Redis for cross-cutting concerns, ElasticSearch/Ignite for data
• REST APIs and messaging
• Camunda (BPM engine) and IBM ODM (BRMS engine)
• Docker images and Helm charts for packaging and delivering