Case study: Creditspring
Business banking · 20 December 2022Katharine Yacovone
🖥️ Website: https://creditspring.co.uk/
💼 Industry: Small loans and credit
📈 Stage: Startup
📍 Headquarters: UK
💳 Product used: The Revolut Business API
When small loans provider Creditspring got started, the team wanted to take a fresh approach to financial borrowing: making the process simple, transparent, and effective. This meant moving away from the typical interest approach – which can lead to long-term debt – and instead introducing a subscription-based model. By paying a fixed monthly fee, customers can take on smaller loans to build credit and develop financial resilience.
Creditspring couldn't make this work for customers without prioritising clarity and speed. And forward-thinking ideas call for cutting-edge technology.
Application program interfaces, or APIs, are an essential piece of adapting to the digital age for businesses, some even calling this the ‘API Economy.’ APIs are technologies that let different systems communicate with each other, so companies can automate and programme operations across platforms to their heart’s desire: cutting down on admin and speeding up services. It’s no wonder 97% of businesses agree APIs are massively important to their survival, according to a report from Rapid API. Basically, they’re the powerhouse of business proficiency.
But, many businesses still face challenges introducing this software effectively. When Creditspring sought the right fix for its rapid expansion in 2021, the team needed an easy-to-implement solution that helped them better serve their customers. Spoiler: the Revolut Business API was the answer.
Challenge: what were their growing pains?
As Creditspring grew, manually processing customer loans just wouldn’t cut it. At the peak of this original approach for loan batching, the team spent as much as two hours per day completing customer transactions. That’s right, nearly a quarter of the workday, on top of reconciliations and error chasing. Now that time is freed up to focus on issues that really matter to them – and their members.
“Growing from 10,000 members at the end of 2020 to 142,000 at the end of September 2022 meant we had to future-proof the business to ensure we could continue to scale without compromising the level of service to customers. We aim to continue growing through the cost-of-living crisis, focusing on delivering simple yet effective products to help our members through those difficult times,” said Jérémy Fouilloux, Senior Brand Manager at Creditspring.
To keep up their high level of service and accessibility, Creditspring needed an integrated solution for loan disbursement. Rather than pushing one loan request down an assembly line, they looked for a tool that combined the steps, letting them speedily release money and stretch for continuous scalability.
Solution: so, how did they fix it?
Creditspring adopted the Revolut Business API to stay on top of efficiency despite customer growth. They could quickly integrate this software into their workflow to automate and streamline the loan disbursement process. The API offered high flexibility and accessibility, letting Creditspring get money to customers quickly without waiting for manual payments to go through.
With the Revolut Business API, Creditspring could efficiently work through batches of loans and scale fast. But it didn’t stop there. Eventually, they began using more of Revolut Business’s product offering to improve other parts of the business.
“After signing up just for automated payments, we’ve used Revolut Business’s virtual cards to better manage employee expenses as well as to automate refunds and send referral fees to customers. We took advantage of the automated Xero feeds, to make accounting for and reconciling a large volume of customer transactions much more streamlined,” adds Charles McCulloch, Finance Manager at Creditspring.
That wasn’t all. Their accounting and reconciliation saw a boost – automatically updating ledgers through their Revolut Business account, marking loans as disbursed, and feeding information directly into Xero, this new approach demanded very little manual admin. Not only did the API help the team keep up with customer loan demands, but the positive impact spread across the business.
Results: what did they get out of it?
Creditspring’s use of Revolut’s Business API saved them as much as 25% on manual admin and processing time, allowing them to give out around 187K loans worth £53M since implementation. On top of saving a massive amount of time on workload, the automation prevented manual entry mistakes and duplications, cutting errors by 300%.
The Revolut Business API also helped Creditspring maintain an above-average score of 4.7 on Trustpilot, where 9 in 10 customers have left ‘excellent’ reviews. Creditspring transformed its entire business model thanks to our API, allowing them to focus on their goal of offering a healthy alternative to credit cards and payday loans.
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