5 ways tech is transforming alternative finance

You’d be hard pushed to find anyone that questions the transformative effect of technology on the financial industry. Over recent years, we’ve seen technological advances bring new levels of visibility, automate swathes of menial tasks, and supercharge the ability of financial institutions to price, target, and market their products and services. But how does this translate in the alternative finance space? And what challenges does it present for a scale-up? 

"In the 25-plus years I’ve been in technology, I’ve seen a lot of change. Technology is no longer just a supplier to the business but is fundamental to driving its direction and success. This throws up a completely different set of opportunities and challenges for a modern CTO. Here, I outline five areas in which it has the most impact".

1. Creating a smooth user experience

There are a lot of steps behind a loan decision. Technology can enable a slick, simple, consistent journey that’s pain-free for borrowers, intermediaries, and third parties despite this background complexity. Technology should never replace the human touch, however, and this is an important differentiator for us. ThinCats has a strong regional sales presence - with an excellent understanding of the local markets - and I see technology as complementing that on-the-ground knowledge to remove the barriers to execution.

2. Making accurate credit risk assessments

The way the industry consumes and shares data is progressing all the time. This makes due diligence something we can continue to improve, automate and make consistent. Technology is paving the way for us to have a real business understanding of who we’re lending to – quickly and at a detailed level - without human resource having to be deployed at greater scale.

3. Gaining a deeper understanding of our clients and the wider sector

Access and use of this data go much deeper than assessing potential clients – it supports the entire lifecycle and our understanding of the whole market.

We continue to invest in our proprietary credit risk model PRISM, which provides a comprehensive and instantaneous view of the financial strength of nearly 450,000 mid-sized businesses. Strengthening and advancing the machine learning behind this modelling allows us to assess individual loan opportunities more accurately and efficiently. Beyond the loan initiation stage, it also allows us to understand the individual borrower’s financial health over time as well as to get a good macro view of the sector by comparing similar businesses across multiple risk, borrowing and growth metrics.

4. Building stakeholder confidence

Technology also plays an increasing role in how we exchange information and give assurance to our wider stakeholders – our investors and shareholders – by allowing us to provide accurate insights into the true pulse of the organisation.

It adds further integrity that allows management to demonstrate a high degree of understanding of the client businesses that we lend to and can provide a real-time view of how the ThinCats business itself is operating.

5. Tailoring our offering

At ThinCats, we offer bespoke funding solutions for mid-sized UK SMEs. Having this targeted business proposition gives us a lot of opportunity to finely tailor our offering to that specific market. In this context, technology becomes a real strength from a delivery perspective.

What unique challenges does technology pose for scale-ups?

The biggest technological challenge for any scale-up is making the right decisions about where to invest. At ThinCats, there are so many different technology choices we could be progressing. It’s vital that we’re disciplined in the tech decisions we make and don’t overcomplicate our position.

As a scale-up, we don’t have armies of people who can progress these projects, so we have a specific execution plan – we limit the number of things we pursue and we do each one well.

On the other hand, we’re in the fortunate position of not having any legacy technology to remedy. More than 90% of my team are focused on moving us forward - we only have around 10% keeping the lights on for the historical technology stack. In previous organisations, I had to invest a large proportion of effort in keeping things alive that I didn’t actually want to maintain. Here, my team can invest nearly all its energy in moving forward.

Billy Ferguson