RedAmberGreen Q1 2023

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Customer story: Merchant Money

Merchant Money boosts data-driven approach with LendingMetrics' ADP

Since 2013, Merchant Money has provided unsecured business loans and alternative finance to SMEs across the UK. The firm’s focus is constant – to ensure that its clients enjoy the clarity of transparent lending and the financial confidence to realise their business potential. It has helped countless businesses of all sizes and in all sectors, working closely with other industry experts to the highest standards.

This led them to choose LendingMetrics' Auto Decision Platform as their strategic partner for implementing the technology.

However, initial reservations around the sophisticated capabilities of ADP, the LendingMetrics team were able to rapidly accustom them to the platform and involve them heavily in the implementation and launch process, which led to valuable feedback. despite their “Our team is very data-driven,” says Jake Furman, Head of Products at Merchant Money. “Understanding what ADP allows us to do with data has led to a lot of conversations about optimisation with LendingMetrics.” Indeed, working with data – and more importantly, learning from that data and being able to make informed revisions to the decisioning process – is one of the key pillars which underpins ADP’s design.

The implementation

The team at Merchant Money are not tech experts, nor should they be; their focus is on excellence in lending, not technology. Thus, they desired a strategic partner who could guide them through the implementation process – a request which LendingMetrics was happy to fulfil.

The challenge

In 2020, Merchant Money was accredited by the British Business Bank to facilitate business lending during the COVID-19 pandemic. This of course was great news, but it also served to highlight any operational pain points or pitfalls within the business. Looking at their decisioning funnel, Merchant Money saw ample room to improve processes. While Merchant Money wanted to enhance their decision-making process through automation, they recognised the value of their expert underwriters and did not wish to replace them with a single algorithm. Instead, they aimed to transition to an "assisted decisioning" model and identified core processes that could be augmented with an automated system.

The future Jake and the team at Merchant Money believe that the perfect decision engine is somewhere out there. The business plans to push further into embedded finance, implementing more products and always remaining true to its data- driven approach. They are also weighing up the possibility of introducing AI to support their decisioning process, to further analyse and learn from customer data. Jake concludes: "We see ADP as central to our strategy moving forward."

It was this aspect in particular which intertwined the two teams in a feedback loop throughout the implementation phase, ultimately leading to the platform being highly tailored to Merchant Money’s requirements. This close working relationship between the teams was much appreciated. “I've enjoyed working with the LM team,” Jake continues. “The biggest compliment I can pay them is they’re very flexible; - it's never just ‘computer says no’, it's ‘let’s look into this’.”