Top 10 Tools for FinTech-Lending in Australia

Technology acts as a parameter of growth in a country. It is essential for a country to be on par with the changing pace and face of growth when competing with the world economies. However, technology is not the only beacon of the growth parameter. Finance is fuel to not only technology but other facets as well. Stronger financial backing ensures stronger developments in technology and otherwise.

The integration of technology with finance has meant that there are new possibilities and a broader scope for business people to carry forward their businesses. In the old days, we only used to deem banks and corporates as ‘lenders,’ but the tables have turned now. It has become more intensive in terms of calculating the risk factor and the rate of return. 

The banking and financing system of the world has become one of the most crucial sectors because of its induction nature to the talents and innovative ideas. This sector happens to be the first one to assess the future of these plans. Therefore, the sector is the reason for growth, it has also become one of the most critical sectors, and the competition has gone to a cut-throat level.

With the introduction of technology in the financial sector, it has given rise to freelance lenders, who are neither of the above two. FinTech technologies such as IoT, AI, Blockchain, and others have paved the way to ensure that these lenders are on a similar footing with the biggies. Such has been its importance that its investment has reached approximately US$55.3 billion by the end of 2019. 

There is a flurry of tools that are also helping to appeal to consumers and businesses. They not only provide simplified user-experience, seamless integration, but they are also ensuring more straightforward access to advanced tech at the same time. In this article, we discuss 10 such tools that are essential for FinTech-Lending in Australia. 

Tools that are important for FinTech-Lending:

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce CRM is a customer relationship management solution that aims to bring companies and customers together. It helps in integrating all your departments, be it commerce, service, sales, or marketing, which enables it to draw insights into the customer. Here is why Salesforce CRM is a must-have tool for any lender –

• It helps in creating a more transparent lending process by utilizing the data available across several departments.
• It ensures end-to-end compliance and better reporting.
• It pre-approves offers for existing customers, which ensures that only the suitable offers reach the end customer.
• It helps in finding the target customers by analyzing their data.
• It helps in automating redundant processes.
• It helps in automating the origination and underwriting processes.

There are several modules of Salesforce available in the market, and the prices start at $25 per month.

Equifax

Equifax is the leading provider of credit information and analysis in Australia. The technology that they possess helps them in discovering unique insights about the customers, thereby aiding better decision making. The software helps the user in drawing free credit reports for themselves and understand how to decipher it the right way.

It also helps in managing your credit profile, which ensures that your identity is never at stake and induces a ban on anyone else trying to misuse it. Equifax also helps the lending institutions to make better decisions regarding customer credit, managing portfolio risk, or mitigating fraud by providing you key insights.

Also, it helps lenders in verifying customer identity and converting potential leads more efficiently. With the help of Equifax, lenders can acquire more customers and grow their business without accentuating their risk profile. There are several plans to choose from, and you can opt for the one best suited for your business.

illion BankStatements

illion BankStatements is another tool that has been massively popular in the FinTech arena. It is a market leader and has been helping lenders in retrieving their customers’ bank statements easily over the years. Not only that, but it also helps in the verification of their key incomes and expenses and categorizes the data to make faster decisions.

With the help of Illion BankStatements, users no longer have to wait for days to receive bank statements from their customers. They also abstain from the confusion which may occur due to receipt of wrong account or incorrect period data. Plus, all of it is secure as they do not store online banking credentials, and data is encrypted using 256-bit encryption, which is secured by 2048-bit keys.

DocuSign

With DocuSign, you can easily get the customers’ documents e-verified with the help of the digital signature. The vanilla version is free, and you pay only for premium features such as requesting signatures from others, signer authentication, custom branding, and others. It helps in reducing paperwork and saving time and manual work of the lenders by transcending the verification work online.

Also, it offers a dashboard to the users, which allows them to see the status of the document and where it is in the signing process. Plus, you get reports and audit trails pertaining to the same. Lenders can also download and print statements on the go. DocuSign ensures the confidentiality of all transactions to ensure the security of the parties involved.

Westpac Payway

Online payment security has been a major problem for transactions all over the world. With the help of Westpac Payway, customers get an off-the-shelf customizable solution that lets them pay by using a secure portal. They provide several benefits for the lenders such as –

• It supports multiple payment channels for your convenience, such as Credit Card, Direct Debit, EFT/Direct Credit, Australia Post?, BPAY?, and PayPal?.
• It also makes the payment more convenient for the other party by offering a lot of options that are seamlessly integrated.
• Westpac Payway ensures that you receive most payments in your account overnight and provides you an option of direct debit, thereby improving the flow of cash.
• It helps in easy reconciliation by access to daily transactions under a single dashboard.

To make it all worth it, Westpac Payway is PCI-DSS compliant and integrates real-time fraud protection in its operations.

ASIC Search

ASIC Search is a tool that lets you search their registers to get a plethora of information. It is helpful when you come across a potential client, and you want to know more about them. With the help of this tool, you can search for organization and business names and get relevant documents pertaining to such businesses. It will help you find who their directors and shareholders are and will let you decide if you want to move forward or decline the offer.

Xero

Founded in the year 2006, Xero has steadily risen to be amongst the top SaaS companies in Australia. Initially built with the idea of helping small businesses, they are a cloud-based accounting software company that transcends online collaboration. The accountants and bookkeepers no longer have to travel physically to ‘N’ number of businesses to look into their day-to-day accounting. They can simply meet up at the cloud and manage it all.

Xero provides a cloud-based interface for multiple tasks such as inventory management, payroll, purchasing, expense and asset management, as well as other basic accounting tasks. You can customize the dashboard to track your cash inflow as well as outflow. Also, you get the leverage of automating the bank reconciliation process and invoice payments as well.

Basiq

Basiq is a Sydney-based open banking platform that helps people make smarter financial decisions. Built on open banking data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Basiq enables fintech to access and draw insights from banking data.

Backed by NAB Ventures, Westpac Reinventure and Salesforce Ventures, Basiq is leading innovation in using banking data to deliver customer insights and better products and services for consumers.

Key Benefits

• Verify, assess, and make decisions in real time
• Keep customer data secure and CDR compliant 
• Access your customers financial data with their consent
• Deliver personalised experiences, products and services
• Enhance with 100+ attributes for deeper insights
• Easily integrate into your apps using our APIs or start immediately with our dashboard

UIpath

UIpath is an RPA tool which features three main components –

• UIpath Studio, which allows design automation with the help of diagrams
• UIpath Robot, which executes processes similar to a human being.
• UIpath Orchestrator that helps you to manage your Robots and processes efficiently.

It helps in streamlining processes and uncover your efficiencies while providing key insights to help you move forward in digital transformation. With its help, you can save time and effort, elevate the employees’ experience by providing their better returns, and ensure compliance by following the requisite standards. It ensures improved customer experience by letting robots manage most of the tasks, which not only reduces mistakes but also improves efficiency at the same time.

CloudBankIN

A product from the house of Habile Technologies, CloudBankIN, is an open-source end-to-end digital lending solution software. It is designed to deliver digital capabilities to several lending institutions such as Credit Institutions, Cooperative societies, Microfinance Institutions, and FinTech companies. It constitutes services such as loan origination system, loan servicing, collections, and integrating accounting systems. Additionally, you also get mobility solutions helping you to elevate to the digital world.

Why CloudBankIN?

1. It is ready-to-deploy anytime and anywhere.
2. It automates 90% of business operations for lending Institutions
3. Bankers and industry veterans have reviewed this product and gave it a thumbs up.
4. It can easily integrate with any of the third-party systems due to the presence of a highly customizable API.
5. Users get interactive dashboards and weekly reports to CXOs
6. If you are looking for something different, CloudBankIN has 50+ Out Of Box reports exclusively for your needs.   

Sum Up

Traditional lending companies harbor strong existing relationships with their customers. Thus, established players still retain a chunk of consumer accounts across the spectrum of financial services. 

These traditional lenders leverage the convenience of in-person touchpoints at branch offices to solidify relationships with clients. Some traditional players are investing in their own digital transformation initiatives in a quest to position themselves in a better place, given the new digital era by investing in emerging technologies — such as mobility, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics, and much more. 

Still, their range of offerings, a sudden increase in the number of customers, and uncatered pain points that clients experience are some of the leading contributors to their diminishing popularity in the Australian economy.

In Australia, to be specific, the lending market has seen a significant preference shift from traditional lending companies to FinTech companies providing alternative business lending. As a matter of fact, FinTech companies are changing the very landscape of lending by utilizing data and technology optimally. 

FinTech support peer-to-peer lending, individuals can earn interest by lending to others. Further, FinTech lenders typically approve and fund loans almost instantly. They pull data from several different alternative sources in real-time to quickly determine how likely a borrower is to pay back the loan.

FinTech are fast-growing and are becoming a highly-competitive space. So if you want to stay in the game and be ahead of the curve, you must utilize the best possible resources most efficiently. These tools are a great way to start your FinTech journey, and they may not guarantee success, but they certainly give you leverage to provide a tough fight to your competitors. 

FinTech lenders save money on overhead costs, such as personnel, rent, and administrative expenses. In the growing Australian FinTech market, new EFTPOS and online charging solutions will allow more merchants to be paid through credit cards, thus driving down the cost of receiving payments. The company is now proving to be leveraging the blockchain tech, which will massively reduce the cost of decentralizing ledgers for financial settlements. 

Australian financial system is and will have to handle the consequences of the unforeseen global epidemic. As Australia experiences a rise in cases of Covid19, the industry can expect a recession, loss in global share markets and a decelerated business activity. The economy inevitably suffers as prime economic activities such as tourism, travel and entertainment come to a standstill. The Reserve Bank of Australia has slashed its interest rates to a whopping low (0.5 %) in lieu of the evident effect of the Coronavirus outbreak on the economy. Thus, the lending institutions of Australia might face a setback and increased challenges.

The aforementioned interest rates are expected to stay low for a while now. Additionally, due to the expected recession, unemployment rates are expected to shoot to about 7.5%, which will have an adverse effect on the market, expectantly lowering the property rates. But the factor that will hit the Australian Financial Services the most will be the ‘shaken consumer confidence’. A suppressed economy will weaken the buyer’s confidence, forcing the transaction activity to suffer. Buyers and Sellers retreat to the sidelines till the time some sort of certainty supports their decision making- further challenging the functioning of loan management systems.

Blog URL: https://habiletechnologies.com/blog/top-10-tools-fintech-lending-australia/