Financial services firm Capitalflow has become Ireland’s fastest-growing alternative business lender, serving more than 2000 SME customers. However, the company’s underlying technology infrastructure was holding it back from the next phase of growth. Its lending process was based on a complex mix of manual activities, requiring phone calls, emails, Word files, paper documents, PDFs and spreadsheets. Receiving a customer lending application, assessing this, making a decision and transferring capital could take weeks.
Capitalflow wanted to move away from this disjointed state to a new approach – connecting with their customers digitally end-to-end. They needed to go from manual processes to a digital platform providing a better experience for both customers and staff.
The business turned to Elsewhen to help them architect a new streamlined customer journey for lending. We worked closely with Capitalflow to analyse and determine the key pieces and a new technical architecture that would be needed to achieve its ambitious goals.
Our team mapped out the current business processes and workflows, and conducted over 40 interviews with staff, customers and partners. We performed a gap analysis of Capitalflow’s existing technology to understand what was required to support growth plans.
We designed the future state of the business platform as a service blueprint. To define a new digital infrastructure, we researched the market to shortlist potential technology providers. We then produced an implementation plan to deliver the digital transformation within a 12-month schedule.
Elsewhen gave Capitalflow a complete action-oriented strategy to build its new digital platform. Our approach ensured business continuity and minimise disruption during a safe migration of customers onto the new digital platform. Our technology assessment provided due diligence for the shortlisted vendors: These new digital infrastructure components are connected using modern APIs and algorithms – so processes and decisions can happen in real-time, rather than taking days or weeks.
Capitalflow now has the strategy for a scalable digital platform to improve customer experience, gain greater market share, better identify market opportunities – and roll out new offerings quickly to take advantage of these.
