CASHNOW
Almond Digital Group Co., Ltd.
CASHNOW is a comprehensive lending advisory platform on electronic devices which help customers to find the lender that match them most at their fingertips. In other words, we act as an intermediary having an expertise in lending and readily give an online advice on every loan type such as personal, motorcycle, car and home loan, to all customers through our platform which is a responsive design supporting desktop, tablet, and mobile site.
CASHNOW is set up to help both main stakeholders -borrower and lender. We found that most borrowers urgently need money for consumption and emergencies, but they still lack understanding of the requirement and process of bank loan application. On the other hand, lenders are unable to satisfy the urgent needs due to lengthy screening and reviewing; moreover, limited resources hinder them from attracting and administering new loans of clients.
The service flow above presents how CASHNOW works, who involves in each particular process.
Calculator is considered a crucial and powerful tool for customers to get the accurate estimation which causes from set algorithm in order to help them easily make the right decision.
This is aimed at presenting how CASHNOW develops. Firstly, the business model focuses on technology-oriented product features such as OCR, Scan document. We believe that this could help better customers’ experience for their best convenience and also enhance business efficiency in the long run.
After running the first product-based version for around three months, we found that it is much difficult to communicate with borrowers who are low-tech ones and also hard to accept new technology that they are unfamiliar with (this could happen but it takes a large amount of time and effort to educate these people), so that hybrid solution is proposed to be a workaround to serve the real customers’ need that still feels more comfortable to talk with customer service staff (CS) via an offline call. However, application process still occurs online because the CASHNOW staff submit (a site for CASHNOW customer service staff) is regarded as a helpful tool that displays all dropped leads for CS to call back and take care of each customer by helping send leads to partners directly instead of the borrower. Finally leads are seamlessly sent to lenders via DOBO (Direct Onboard to Branch Operation system; website). DOBO does not only help reduce the burden on CS, but also help us -the intermediary- and lender to better business efficiency through a full-service lead management system.
However, CASHNOW still experienced a trouble, since the business model could not generate much revenue, so that the revenue stream is changed from primarily focusing on commission on success case approved by lenders to a content-based platform. To draw more prospective customers to our platform. CASHNOW believe that good content surrounded by friendly atmosphere would result in an increase in website traffic considered our valuable asset to be used to negotiate with lenders to motivate them to buy our advertising space on our website. Therefore, this is to say the strategy is an extra way to generate business income.
Cross-Selling is another method CASHNOW used to gain more revenue. The concept is to divide all available products into 3 main modules serving all CASHNOW particular main stakeholders (Borrower, Broker, Lender). Selling strategy is aimed to tailor the products to each lender’s needs as normally each existing operation is different due to the size, marketing plan of the company as well as committees’ vision. Therefore, CASHNOW provided lenders with options to match their needs. Moreover, this concept could further be applied to other industries which is not limited to only lending service but also all services requiring customer service operation; for example, the second module designed for broker or telesales could facilitate the communication and data transmission between two insurance customers and providers.
Chat Center is a centralized messaging platform where borrowers could engage in online lending activities. This platform provides integration of instant various messaging channels, a one-stop service messaging management system, an accessible source of lead engagement to all lenders, and synchronization with the back office as well.
Back Office is designed for three main purposes, to notify lenders of real-time leads’ engagement, to identify the prospective borrowers by screening tools, and to proceed with loan transaction of ready-to-transfer borrowers’ data.
DOBO (Direct Onboard to Branch) acts as the data transmission method including both front-end and back-end solutions for CASHNOW customers to select what could serve their needs most. To begin with the front-end, there are two options, Magic Link and Log-in. Magic Link is aimed at adapting itself to customer’s existing working process which users are generally familiar with using email as a tool to be notified of every upcoming activity status from borrowers without putting personal data to access the system. While some prefer the traditional way of access that’s why Log-In could serve as another option. Moving onto the back-end, the sFTP method is widely adopted as it could ensure data security, but the integration of the server is another option matching to some existing company’s system as well. However, no matter what method customer selects, CASHNOW also helps support the separation of user account for configuring role and permission.
Lead Management System allows lenders to manage the quality leads most matched to their requirements. Therefore, lenders will benefit from Lead Management Tools consisting of monitoring tools, tracking loan status tool, reporting engine, and API integration.