Case study: Thinktank automates its lending processes to grow customers

Property lending specialist Thinktank needed to digitise and automate its processes to keep up with customer demand.

James Henshaw CIO at Thinktank spoke to Digital Nation about Thinktank’s journey to remove legacy platforms.

Henshaw said the business was starting to go through exponential growth but all their processes were maintained in an Excel spreadsheet.

“If we wanted to do a valuation request, a credit check, everything was manually done, creating a loan approval letter, every step of the process was manual,” he explained.

Looking for a new platform, Henshaw said he needed one that could help fix a myriad of business problems. Together with his head of digital, they identified the business pain points. 

“We had to do that in order to be able to start the actual transformation. But with the ERP system, we started within a few months implementing the new loans service platform, which Thinktank had previously outsourced to other providers which were costly and very time-consuming, especially around month end,” Henshaw said.

“We started that project towards the middle of 2020, but that was going through assessing different providers with a different managed solution.”

Thinktank selected Salesforce, Henshaw said the implementation of the platform was a “big journey”.

“[Salesforce has] a very deep ecosystem and we're a fully cloud-based business, all the managed packages that exist within this platform, including FinancialForce, we've been able to find virtually everything that we need,” he said.

Henshaw said creating a great employee experience enables a great customer experience and partner experience.

“If your employees aren't having a great experience, then they're not going to give a great experience for their customers,” he said.

Since implementing Salesforce, Thinktank has achieved “significant financial savings” from bringing all its functions in-house.

“Our finance team are able to close month end three days earlier. For the finance team managing those 16 or 17 trusts that is quite substantial,” he said.

“What we've done as part of a change journey, we've embedded business SMEs in the project team, and they've now come across to the technology teams. The change journey has been easy because I've partnered with the business to assist that journey.”

Henshaw said the key to doing any transformation is to have a strong partnership with the business.  

“Business has grown 500 percent and our volumes have increased by 500 percent. That is the most significant benefit,” he said.

“It's enabled us to meet our partner service level agreements (SLAs). We've got market leading SLAs and utilising Salesforce, we've built partner experience portals for our major aggregators, and producers, that's helping them to service their customers.”

Henshaw explained that upgrading their systems wasn’t about increasing customer experience but also enhancing employee experience.

“If employees aren't doing manual things, they're now able to do value-added tasks," he ended.