LendingMetrics is a multi-award-winning financial technology and data specialist based in the UK and Australia. It leads the way in automated decision technology and is now one of the most recognised technology brands in the sector.
In 2020, LendingMetrics won the “Technology Partner of the Year” award at the Consumer Credit Awards – the second award in as many years, made even more meaningful as it is voted for by consumers, not judges. In addition to “Best Technology Partner” at the Car Finance Awards and the “Best Credit Risk Solution” at the Credit & Collections Technology Awards for the fourth consecutive year (2017 – 2020).
Why LendingMetrics?
We had already been working with LendingMetrics since 2019, utilising their Open Banking product OBV to access bank statement data in order to accurately assess the affordability of their customers. We enjoyed working with LendingMetrics, and liked how the company operated, so when we identified a need to enhance our underwriting process, LendingMetrics’ competitively priced Auto Decision Platform (ADP) was the clear solution.
As a specialist lender, we had always been keen to avoid automation in the past but wanted to prepare for an anticipated growth in volume, and make our underwriting process more consistent, robust and scalable. CEO, Dave Hindle said, “having used manual underwriting for 9 years, I was apprehensive about moving away from this, but LendingMetrics demonstrated how ADP could be used to assist decisioning, not only fully automated it, and this made the decision to adopt the underwriting platform much simpler.”
The ADP engine will be used alongside manual underwriting processes and Open Banking solutions, in order to increase lending volume without increasing head count. What’s more, ADP has the ability to test improvements to our credit policy using passive engines, allowing testing of new logic and scorecards without effecting the consumer journey. In addition, we wanted to use a platform separate to our loan system in case there was a need to move things in the future, and ADP was able to provide just that.
The experience
Our existing relationship with LendingMetrics meant we knew the financial technology company would be able able to meet our contact requirements. We were able to have 1-to-1 conversations with the project team and communicate with the people directly involved with the build of ADP, which were important factors in our choosing of a technology partner.
Following a swift scoping stage, we used the UAT environment to run real-time champion/challenge scenarios and retro analysis, and after testing were able to rapidly move to the production environment.
The implementation process was smooth, and although the first phase was a bit daunting for the Operations team, with the support of the LendingMetrics Project Management team we were able to get to grips with everything and after that it was a very straightforward process.
“We were delighted to be able to continue working with Propensio after seeing their previous success with our OBV platform. By choosing ADP to assist their decisioning, Propensio have been able to construct a highly consistent underwriting process, and we look forward to continue working with them as they see the benefits of assisted decisioning.”
– David Wylie (Commercial Director at LendingMetrics)
The result
We are already seeing success with ADP; it not only gives us an immediate increase in capacity but makes our affordability and sustainability assessments more robust and consistent, meaning that we can continue to provide a great service to our customers and introducers and give them access to a range of funding options that might not have been available to them from other lenders.
Dave Hindle went on to say, “using ADP’s innovative Engine Editor, we can make quick changes to our decisioning, rather than having to wait for 3rd party providers to deploy small changes. The ability to build, edit and maintain multiple decision engines without the need for technical or IT-qualified personnel, allows us to remain dynamic and agile. The underwriting team really like the product as it allows them to cope with increased volume and best prepare for an anticipated growth in applications. We can change things within minutes – it’s brilliant!”
Summary
We will continue to use LendingMetrics’ ADP to create complex, powerful or simple policies, and include proprietary scoring algorithms and complex affordability matrices in order to provide the best possible service to our introducers and customers.
