Will Ellis, Chief Revenue Officer at Lenvi, describes the incredible innovations the business is undertaking, and why it’s fintech’s best-kept secret
Lenvi is an ambitious company doing big things with technology. It creates powerful software solutions for lenders, calling itself ‘the future of lending’ and describing the way it tackles modern financial challenges as ‘Fintech+’. Will Ellis, Chief Revenue Officer at Lenvi, has 16 years of financial services experience behind him and is responsible for all business development and marketing within Lenvi.
Lenvi is a business which is able to be agile and introduce effective change quickly, and this is down to the way it was designed from its inception. “It was created to revolutionise the lending industry,” says Ellis. “We are experts in lending and work with over 150 lending companies internationally. Nobody knows lending like we do – we’re proud to say that. Our latest product – PF1 – is a platform designed to deliver to the industry what others can’t.”
PF1 is a loan management platform that enables improved flexibility and agility, allowing the lender to adapt quickly to ever-changing needs of the customer. The goal is to allow lenders to fulfil their promises of rapid digital transformation. “The platform is designed for businesses to make changes quickly,” Ellis continues. “Digital transformation is often slow because lenders are relying on third party vendors to make the changes. Those vendors are not always as reactive to clients’ needs, but PF1 allows our customers and partners to develop on top of the platform themselves, meaning they can introduce change and be in control of their own digital transformation projects.”
Understanding the environment
The market Lenvi operates within is highly regulated, but it truly understands those regulations and the nature of lending. This means it has to provide a highly compliant platform that’s proven to scale, and it does this for some of the largest brands in the world. “Say you’re running a sale on iPhones on Black Friday,” Ellis explains. “We provide all the software that runs the financing on those iPhones, and pretty much every telco company. So we have to provide a platform that also scales during those peaks, as well as enabling continuous change. We unlock the ability for our customers to do continuous deployments, which is where the digital transformation side comes in.”
This freedom for the customer is important for Lenvi; the company believes customers should be in charge of their own destiny. Not only does this improve what they provide and help future-proof them, but it elevates the entire customer and end-user experience. “There’s a growing need for lenders to deliver flexibility and great agility to match the changing needs of their customers, but they’re often failed by third-party systems,” says Ellis.
“The challenge with digital transformation is getting things signed off in a regulated environment. You may have the ability to implement change, but it still needs to go through that regulatory sign-off and audit committees. One of our strengths is how well we know the lending industry, so we’re able to support customers at every stage.”
A major success story for Lenvi has been with Everyday Loans Ltd (ELL). ELL saw demand for its services growing rapidly, but it lacked in-house IT development resources to support its own lending system. This made it difficult to implement change or unify procedures across all of its 76 branches. Integration was required to bring systems together in one place and allow the business to grow.
This is where Lenvi stepped in. It created a robust cloud-based solution to augment the existing system before phasing it out, meaning work at ELL wouldn’t be disrupted while incremental improvements occurred. Eventually, Lenvi consolidated all of ELL’s systems into one cloud-native solution that has allowed the business to make quick changes and scale quickly.
Jamie Place, CIO of ELL, said of the relationship: “Lenvi’s technology-driven approach allows us to scale, grow, and improve operational resilience, ensuring we can focus on delivering a market-leading customer experience.”
A young business with an old soul
Innovation like this is second nature to Lenvi. As a brand, it was launched in March 2023, but the venture was born out of decades of real-world experience. “What we’re doing for customers is continuously innovating and we’re using our experience to understand an ever-changing market and where it’s going,” says Ellis. “We’re able to be advisors as well as a software vendor. Being a new venture gives us flexibility and responsiveness, but it’s our experience that drives what we do. Being new gets peoples’ attention, but being good keeps it.”
Lenvi is also one of the only software providers that’s FCA regulated, so customers can be assured that regulatory compliance is a top priority for everything it does. As for what lies ahead, AI sits on the horizon – as it does for businesses the world over – and Lenvi is already working on its deployment.
“We’ve been working on this with one of our customers to solve a problem,” explains Ellis. “We did this around a document classifier where we were able to take multiple sources of documentation, use AI to find the key pieces of information, and upload them to our loan management platform using our APIs. Then, we were able to bring in automation around that. Where documents would previously have to be manually looked at, we’ve found a key way of automating that process. We’ll look at releasing that shortly as, effectively, a new module.”
Continuous improvement
Innovation will only continue and accelerate at Lenvi. The business works hard to nurture its people and strives to be an enjoyable place to work. One thing it has introduced is the Innovation Challenge, an annual event whereby the tech teams at Lenvi are invited to get some additional training and also work on developing problem-solving technologies. Some of the AI development that Lenvi is now working on came out of the last Innovation Challenge, which highlights how important it is to continuously develop the skill sets of the team.
“More innovation, more AI, more automation – that’s how the future looks for Lenvi,” Ellis concludes. “We want our customers’ customers to interact with their financial services provider as a complete omnichannel experience. Whatever time of day it is, you should be able to pay off your loan, for example, or interact in whatever way with that provider. It’s our job to ensure we continue to develop that technology to create smooth, 24/7 access.”
This article was originally posted in Interface Magazine, November 2023
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