IBS Journal October 2015
Made in Britain
Reparo Finance, a UK-based lending start-up focused on the SME sector, has become the first of its kind to launch on a cloud-based offering from Mambu. What’s the story?
by Martin Whybrow At Reparo, the platform is supporting the two parts of its business, comprising standard structured loans (£50,000 to £1 million with repayment profiles of up to 24 months and with a promised two- day decision-making) and its Fast Track Business Finance (loans of up to £50,000, over a maximum of 52 weeks, secured only via directors’ indemnities, and based on a credit scoring model). Reparo’s operations director, Sharon
Bryden, explains that the start-up looked at a number of lending system options when preparing to open for business and felt the cloud-based solution had a range of benefits. It was deemed to be intuitive and easy to learn, straightforward to imple- ment compared with older, more tradition- al systems, and with sufficient flexibility to handle Reparo’s planned bespoke finance products. Bryden was previously head of
relationship management at UK-based Aldermore Bank, which uses Temenos’ T24 core banking system. There was good feed- back from other Mambu users, she says, sug- gesting the platform was reliable and robust. That assurance was important. ‘As the first [SME] lender in the UK to use this platform, it was quite a big step for us,’ she says. The pay-per-use model, without
upfront licence fees, was also clearly attrac- tive for a start-up. ‘The cost of other sys- tems in comparison to Mambu meant it
54 © IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
Fact file
Whilst Reparo Finance is the first of its kind to use the Mambu system in the UK, there are a few SME lending users elsewhere, such as Nordic-based Ferratum.
was ideal from that aspect as well,’ says Bryden. Reparo can also add users and set up
new branches in the future without addi- tional licence fees. At present, it has four users on the system, but these are early days. It believes there is an opportunity from lending to ‘neglected yet viable’ UK SMEs to allow them to continue day-to- day operations and to provide additional capital. From signing for the system to
go-live took around three months. Bryden believes it could have been feasi- ble to do so within the eight weeks tout- ed by Mambu but Reparo wasn’t ready to cutover within this time scale, as some aspects were still under preparation. ‘It was our choice,’ she says. ‘During the whole process of training, testing, imple- mentation and going live, we haven’t had to do a lot in terms of customisation,’ she adds.
spotlight: cloud
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
