CreditMatch: Innovative Market Place for Point of Sale Finance - Driving Competition in Retail Banking

PROBLEM: A customer walks down the average high street and sees that most large
traditional retailers will offer some type of instalment finance as a payment option. That same
customer is later that day browsing online stores and struggles to find a single retailer that is
offering the flexibility to pay in instalments.
One high street example is DFS which works with one finance provider called Hitachi
Capital. A customer that want finance has to fill in a finance application form that is sent off
to Hitachi Capital. If Hitachi Capital declines the customer’s request for finance, the customer
won’t be able to buy the sofa on finance. This means the customer is unhappy because they
didn’t get their sofa, DFS is unhappy because they didn’t make a sale and Hitachi Capital is
unhappy because they couldn’t arrange finance. This a loose-loose-loose scenario which is
played out hundreds of times a day, every day, in retail stores across the country.
SOLUTION: Divido Financial Services Limited is seeking to develop CreditMatch, an online
B2B market place for retailers who wish to offer customers simple & quick to use POS
finance (pay by instalments over 6-60 months with 0% interest). Advantages:
- INNOVATIVE REAL TIME BIDDING MARKETPLACE: publishes lenders rates online
(like on MoneySupermarket/ CompareTheMarket) thus increasing transparency &
competition and ultimately drive down the cost of finance.
- NOVEL CREDIT MATCHING ALGORITHM: enables customers to complete one
application for multiple lenders. Current PoC version of CreditMatch is manual & compares
rates of 2 lenders in ~5mins, this project will enable automatic comparison of customer data
against ALL lenders requirements in the market place (~ 75 by 2021 ) in seconds.
- LOW COST, SCALABLE, CLOUD BASED PLATFORM: can be used by orgs of any
size/sector/location & is 30% cheaper for retailers than competitors (Pay4Later) who charge
set-up/maintenance fees