SocietyOne cuts approval times by 80%

SocietyOne, a peer-to-peer lender, needed a more efficient way to verify borrower information and reduce lengthy approval times. By implementing BankStatements, SocietyOne cut approval times by 80% and improved the overall experience for both customers and assessors.

SocietyOne is Australia’s first peer-to-peer lender and the largest provider of personal loans in the Australian marketplace sector. Industry – Alternative Finance

Challenge overview

As part of its responsible lending strategy, SocietyOne requires applicants to provide their bank statements as a validation point to prove income and verify expenses. This process was manual and required customers to be organised and time efficient to close the application process as soon as possible.

The result was elongated approval processes which increased bounce rates during the onboarding process and required more resources of SocietyOne to facilitate manual bank statement retrieval, consolidation and review.

Solution overview

To significantly enhance the efficiency of SocietyOne’s bank statement retrieval and review process, we introduced its digital platform, BankStatements.

BankStatements offers a streamlined, user-friendly solution that allows customers to share their bank statement data with lenders via their mobile phone or laptop. This digital and mobile-friendly approach ensures a swift and seamless customer journey, drastically reducing the time required to retrieve, deliver, and process bank statements for both customers and brokers.

For SocietyOne, it was crucial that the integration of new technology be efficient and minimally disruptive. Collaborating with the team resulted in a rapid and smooth integration, making the onboarding process remarkably straightforward.

Since employing BankStatements in its lending process, SocietyOne has noted a huge increase in onboarding and retrieval efficiency:

• Customer experience: 20-second turnaround as opposed to the previous 10 to 15 minutes of logging into online banking, searching, exporting, and sending bank statements
• Credit assessor experience: Income, expenses, and debts are efficiently categorised and arranged to allow brokers to intuitively access desired records, greatly increasing the time spent on each applicants review
• Taking the bank statement retrieval process online has greatly increased contact and access points for both customers and brokers which have had a huge impact on efficiency.

“Our approval times have dropped by 80%. It used to take an average of five days from a lead to approval. It now takes us on average one business day or less as we have reduced friction both for a customer and our team. Assessment time has also decreased by 30%. It takes about one hour to assess “paper statements”, but only 30-40 minutes for bank statements.” – Jonathan Chan, Chief Operating Officer, SocietyOne

Solution results:

• Enhanced efficiency, increasing approval times by 80%, from five days to one day or less
• Improved customer experience, by offering a 20-second data-sharing process for customers
• Streamlined lending, reducing manual work for customers and assessors