We took the opportunity to catch up with PEAC’s Brand Development Director, Stephen Fenton, about the launch and why he thinks ‘Gateway’ will help businesses get better access to finance for the hard assets they need.
Stephen, can you tell us a bit about PEAC and your new Gateway App?
PEAC Finance is a Business to Business (B2B) lender focussed on supporting SME’s, providing leasing solutions across a broad range of asset classes from business equipment to plant and machinery. We offer fast and effective financing solutions to equipment manufacturers, dealers and distributors with transactions varying in size from £1,000 up to £5 million.
‘Gateway’, our recently launched Point of Sale app, has been developed by PEAC to provide objective and statistically valid measures, drawing from our in-house scorecard, for fast and consistent decisions on applications relating to hard asset finance.
Uniquely for PEAC’s vendor accounts, our auto-approval process takes both the business credit profile and value of the asset to determine the facility limit. We are able to access and analyse a wide range of elements when making a decision which means vendors can offer highly tailored finance agreements for their customers.
Once a vendor’s assets are uploaded to the app as part of their on-boarding process, this free to use multi-platform device can provide instant credit decisions through to pay-outs – all at the touch of a button!
What made you decide to invest in this solution?
In today’s competitive environment, customers are used to fast automated decisions in their own personal financial affairs and there’s growing expectation for the vendor world to move in the same direction.
Having worked with Experian for many years, the PowerCurve decisioning platform was a natural fit for our ‘Gateway’ app, as it provides for a positive customer journey experience and so we were confident it could manage the level of complexity required to make this work.
Tell us a bit about how it works?
‘Gateway’ generates the quote by performing multiple background checks, resulting in an instant credit decision. The app also assesses the unsecured element of the application, for a well-rounded credit decision.
A combination of Experian’s PowerCurve Originations and a Hard Asset scorecard development means that the solution combines multiple data points (including details on the asset being financed) and makes a holistic decision on the applicant in seconds, whilst still making the considered decision we adhere to, as a responsible lender.
Why is Experian the best partner for you?
For us it was the speed, data, scorecard expertise and collaboration. Experian are a proactive partner who took the time to understand our business and apply an innovative approach to meeting our business challenge.
Working with Experian we knew that the PowerCurve platform along with intelligent scorecards means that a vendor of trailers, for example, can pre-load all their assets into ‘Gateway’ along with a tick list of variables.
Why do you think this is such an important innovation for the industry?
Put simply, ‘Gateway’ is all about ease of use for the vendor. Accessing credit for any business can sometimes be a frustrating process. Having a platform that can provide instant credit decisions vs. manually processing each deal is a game changer on many levels.
Most importantly it’s about supporting businesses to get better and quicker access to better credit decisions that are relevant to their circumstances which means they can get on with making their own business a success. But there are many other advantages.
For our vendors it’s also a huge differentiator. They can offer credit approval on the spot as opposed to a competitor who could take hours/days and the customer experience is transformed in the process due to its speed and efficiency.
With speed also comes efficiency – less paperwork for vendors and their customers as well as significant savings for our underwriting team who can focus their time on those extra special cases that need more attention.
We’ve had positive feedback from the vendors who we’ve already on-boarded, all of whom are making tangible savings in resource. Off the back of this success we are about to deploy increased functionality including DocuSign© to let customers securely sign agreements in seconds.