Vision360 Q&A – Enhancing borrower relationships at ThinCats
What is Vision360?
Vision360 is a web-based portal developed by ThinCats to deliver both an at-a-glance dashboard of full ThinCats portfolio and also provide our Borrower Services Team* with a comprehensive 360-degree view of each of the borrowers within their own portfolio including financial health, performance versus forecasts, updated PRISM risk and security grades.
*ThinCats’ Borrower Services Team is comprised of relationship directors (RDs) supported by associate relationship directors (ARDs). Each pair manages a portfolio of borrowers, providing real focus and attention to each borrower and building strong relationships with them. Their role is to identify opportunities to support borrower’s growth aspirations and additional lending, spot early warning signs of any distress and provide tailored support to borrowers that need it.
Why was Vision360 introduced?
Prior to launching Vision360, MI from borrowers was collected, often from non-standardised pdfs or PowerPoints, and manually entered into spreadsheets.
This approach was very time-consuming, induced inevitable human errors and meant that despite receiving full MI from borrowers each month, we were only using a small subset of this information – just what was required to calculate covenant compliance.
It was determined that a more automated approach would be more efficient, more accurate and would free up time to be spent on supporting our customers.
How does Vision360 improve the service we provide to customers?
By providing RDs and ARDs with a consistent, data-driven guide as to where to focus attention. The efficiency gains and easier access to useful insights on borrowers at their fingertips, means the teams have significantly more bandwidth to focus their time on managing relationships, rather than inputting data.
Vision360 also provides insights on debt capacity which can lead to discussions around how much more we would potentially be willing to lend a borrower. This facilitates proactive conversations with borrowers who may be keen to accelerate growth but are unsure whether they would be able to access the necessary funding.
What are the key features of Vision360?
Vision360 displays a dashboard view of all borrowers, which can be filtered by RD, providing them with a series of performance metrics (customisable for each user and sortable), such as recency of MI, covenant compliance, key financials. This provides an ‘at a glance’ view of the portfolio of borrowers.
From here, users can drill into an individual borrower across several pages:
- Optics shows key information like historical covenant compliance, headroom trends in key covenants and trends in actual vs forecast sales and profits
- Financial Health Check summarises current and trended covenant performance, which informs the priority ranking. It also displays potential early warning indicators from 3rd party sources, arrears on other debt obligations and Open Banking-derived insights on income and expenditure
- Financials displays the monthly balance sheet and P&L metrics, in tabular and chart form
- Comments allow users to input their own free text commentary explaining the trends seen through the data
- Grading allows users to verify the relevant metrics from MI, and calculate updated stars and padlocks (PRISM Risk and Security gradings)
What future developments are planned for Vision360?
We will shortly be adding an alerts page, which will share Companies House filings, a task that is currently manually executed. The alerts function will then be extended to provide alerts based on other sources of information beyond just Companies House filings.
We are beginning to track other KPIS beyond purely financial metrics, for example, occupancy rates within care homes, or average order value in the food delivery space. Essentially measures used by each individual borrower internally to identify potential issues at as early a stage as possible.
We are also starting to look at matching borrowers to other similar businesses in their industry to provide some benchmarking analysis of their performance against a relevant peer group population.
What is the ultimate goal of Vision360?
The intention is that thanks to Vision360, our Relationship Directors are able to spend as much time as possible having the most informed conversations with borrowers and providing the best service possible.
Future developments, such as benchmarking will move Vision360 from being a purely internal tool to one that can be shared with advisors, PE Sponsors and borrowers themselves, arming them all with the insights to accelerate growth while minimising risk.