Last week we logged on to the Leasing Life Virtual Conference and Awards.

We were a little sad that we didn’t get to attend the event in Vienna 😢 but we decided to make the most of things by getting involved in true Banking Works style. 😁

As a platinum sponsor of the event we were scheduled to give a presentation, and directly after this our Product Director, Dom Rodwell appeared on the final panel to discuss innovation in financial services.

Rather than giving the usual powerpoint-and-pointing take on presenting, we decided that as the slot was pre-recorded, we would make a short film featuring as many of the team as we could cram in…well why not. ❓

The idea behind the film was to give a human take on the transformation journey that our own business has been on in the past 12 months.

And, we were so blown away by the response that we wanted to share it beyond the conference.

N.B. I should probably tell you at this point, that from idea to final edit this film took us just under a week to make – it was in itself a journey of blood, sweat & tears.

Here’s an overview:

Our story of blood, sweat and tears

˜Transformation is a word we hear a lot these days. Organisations of all shapes and sizes seem to be in the midst of some kind of digital overhaul, from expanding their online presence, to integrating complex, automation software to their back-ends.

With that in mind, we wanted to tell our story – about the blood, sweat and tears of making it happen and what we achieved along the way.

Change was (and is) hard.

Over 192 days, we reinvented our business to become more agile, resilient and crucially – automated to better serve the needs of an evolving financial landscape.

It was a transformation shaped by talking to our clients and unpicking their changing needs, and by understanding how our own products and services could be improved upon.

With their feedback and recommendations noted, we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck into the work.

To succeed in our transformation ambitions, we knew we had to confront the idea of the comfort zone and make sure we didn’t make the easy mistake of falling into this trap. This meant we had to not only initiate change at a digital level, but also, and perhaps more crucially, at a cultural level.

The answer to this isn’t rocket science – it’s all about communication. So, from the outset, we made sure we baked this into the project through regular engagement and by using comms tools like Slack, to make the process easier. We made sure that the whole team was able to share ideas and contribute to the mission.

Things got technical…and remote.

We laid the foundations for our journey with our core operational platform, BladeOS. On top of this, we can manage day to day decisioning, automation, routine portfolio management tasks (and complementary systems such as portfolio analysis), payments, social and SMS messaging, and our new customer service platforms and knowledge guides.

But then Covid struck.

Few global events will upend business plans quite like a pandemic, but after taking a breath for the shock, we got on with delivering against our project milestones.

As always, client needs took centre stage, and while continuing our development, we helped them deliver the large-scale portfolio restructuring and payment holiday programmes demanded by the crisis.

By migrating operations and processes to the Cloud and digitally enabling client legacy systems, we pivoted to ably meet their urgent demands.

Faster, better, and cheaper, who says you can’t have all three?

In the past 6 months, we have run tens of thousands of automated processes that were previously done manually. It’s saved us hundreds of man-days.

Time efficiencies weren’t the only wins achieved; we also became more precise and streamlined.

Our overall error rate is now down to 1.3%

66% of all customer payments for our clients are now processed on-line

And for those that have implemented our new messaging tools, there has been a 400% increase in customer payments.

Though the results have been transformative for our business, the journey was difficult. Trial and error, shelving large portions of work, devising new ideas and adapting old ones, it all happened through a process of conceptualising, testing, and building. What used to take us months to complete now takes only days. 🙌🏼

Ultimately, the end result of this transformation isn’t just an improved set of products and services. It transformed our mindset too. The team is buzzing with inventiveness, speed, and a belief in their own ability to adapt. 👏