What Will You Digitalize in Your Financial Business?

You may already be tired of reading about post-COVID technological trends, witnessing the success of emerging fintechs and seeing millions of dollars spent on technological fantasies. But where is your financial business placed within this frenzy of concepts and technologies that are flooding us by different means?

"The first question you can ask yourself is: Where does it hurt?" Ruben Galindo put this question to the participants of a session of the ASOFOM Innovation Committee in February 2022.

Knowing where to start a systematization project is not easy since most financial institutions in Latin America lack organized data about their commercial and operational processes. So how do we prioritize this issue objectively and profitably?

I suggest we break it down into smaller pieces:

• Increase your demand
• Speed up your placement
• Reduce your risk and cost of customer acquisition
• Manage your portfolio and automate its recovery
• Increase your funding
• Manage your finances
• Manage information from all areas in a single view

What areas do you want to focus on? If I were you, I would go big and answer: in all of them and at the same time! But we already know that putting out several fires at once dilutes us, tires us out and ends up burning us.

In this article I will focus on what gets your business running: your commercial process.

Information technologies allow you to rapidly scale some processes, so I recommend that you digitize the following:

Customer Acquisition

• Generate demand through the internet, your referral network and your own sales team. 
• #SocialSelling is a successful discipline, generally carried out through LinkedIn. It is slow, demanding of creativity but very safe for B2B merchandising.
• Building a face-to-face and a digital network is a practice that works if you have the resources to keep it active, engaged and motivated.
• Mailings continue to be an effective way of promotion and communication, even more so than paid advertising on social networks or search engines.
• The most popular social networks, such as Instagram and Facebook, are widely useful for the placement of consumer loans. 
• The entrance to your commercial process must start from a single capture point, whether it is your website, your salesperson on his cellphone, or any piece of content published within a banner or blog.

Profiling

Direct all opportunities to an automated and institutionalized risk-scoring process from the earliest possible stage and look for elements that disqualify the prospect quickly and painlessly with each piece of information you receive.

• Prevent your sales team from wasting time trying to rescue transactions that aren't worth their time and effort.
• Extract part of their record automatically through services that allow digital consultation in real time (bureaus, blacklists, INE/RENAPO, SAT).
• Integrate a small and lean file to analyze if it is worth investing the time of all those involved.
• Extract information directly from the documents and capture key points in brief forms to filter and profile as quickly as possible; in the origination process, the sooner the disqualification, the better.
• Last but not least, quote automatically based on the profile generated by the minimum data of each prospect.

Integration

Gather and centralize in a single, secure and digital vault all the information (internal and external) of each operation, from the first contact with a prospect until the end of its days on this planet.

• Complete a file with automatic follow-up. Don't allocate the promotional executive’s time to chasing paperwork as that will only cause friction with your prospects.
• Monitor automatically the expiration date of documents sent by prospects. You don't want to have a prospect sending you the last document and your executive notifying them two days later that their proof of address expired more than a week ago.
• Ensure that your company is the owner of the information and not the personal devices of your executives. Patrimonial relationships are not acceptable and the account statements of your prospects should not be hanging around in your collaborators’ WhatsApp, Dropbox, Google Drive or personal emails.
• Remember that every time you receive a new requirement or document, you must collect this new information that complements the prospect's profile. This helps to qualify or disqualify an operation and maintain an updated profile.

Formalization and Updates

A finance company does not make money from placing a loan, it makes money when it recovers it. Be sure to ensure that you use the best technology endorsed by law to sign contracts and promissory notes. Protect your tools and processes so that you have a complete file in the face of judicial rehabilitation.

• Take advantage of electronic signatures to provide even more legal certainty to an operation than that given by a pen and pencil signature. If your lawyer says it won't work, find another lawyer (for a second point of view, of course).
• On a recurring and automatic basis, collect information to recalculate the risk of the portfolio or reveal new business opportunities with your current clients. It is easier to make more capital with someone with whom you already have a relationship than to look for new fish in the sea.

We are not suggesting that you digitize your business process and eliminate your executives from the map. On the contrary, we recommend that you boost your team by arming your people with the best technological arsenal that your money can buy.

In a business-to-business commercial context, we don't see 100 percent digital self-service as viable because most of your prospects like to be served and cared for by someone throughout a process. We think that's understandable given the fact that the financing business tends to handle higher amounts in more complex schemes than traditional consumer credit.

With all this in mind, I believe that a profitable approach to your strategy can be the design of a commercial system operated by capable people and with very good technology so that you generate a cleaner path to solving your problems. Simplify your day-to-day work so that your vision drives a profitable and scalable business model.