A NEW BREED

on the case
Truly mobile
After 135 years of collecting and processing consumer loans exactly the same way,
Provident Financial is enjoying the lucrative rewards of digital transformation
A
nybody who has
borrowed money from a
home credit provider is
likely to have dealt with
Provident Financial.
In 2013 it was reported that out of an
estimated 3 million people in the UK
who borrowed through the nonstandard
lending market, 1.8 million
did so with Provident. Two years on,
the company counts 2.5 million
customers on its books across the
UK and Ireland.
And in a very old-fashioned
industry, Provident was about as
old-fashioned as you can get. From
1880, when it was established in
Bradford, to about a year ago, its vast
network of local agents went about
their business in almost exactly the
same way.
The self-employed agents would
attend their local branch on a
Thursday to pick up their ‘collecting
list’, which was an A5 piece of
paper that detailed the loans their
customers had. They would then visit
those customers to make the loan
collections and note down how much
money they received.
If a customer wanted another loan at
this time, they could fill out a form on
a big sheet of multi-carbon paper and
sign it around 30 times.
Then, on a Tuesday, the agent would
wander back into the branch and
hand over all that paperwork to
a clerk, who would enter it into
Provident’s core IT system. After a
day of processing, the routine would
start again.
Out with the old
It’s not difficult to spot the
inefficiencies in the system –
particularly in an age where digital
reigns supreme. In 2013, Jono
Gillespie, technology and change
director of Provident’s consumer
credit division, thought it was about
time something was done about it.
A chartered accountant by trade,
Gillespie had previously been the
division’s finance director, but his
love of technology had led him to the
new role. After spending his first year
in the job becoming accustomed to
his back-end IT environment, he was
ready to enact some change.
‘It became fairly obvious that we
could do a lot more than we were
doing,’ he tells Information Age. ‘The
first thing I figured we could do that
wouldn’t necessarily be a massive
change was, instead of the agent
physically having to pick up paper,
we could put something into a
smartphone app that had all the
information they need.
‘They could then just tap the
information into the smartphone app
and that would get uploaded into the
system automatically, which would
cut out the middle man.’
Gillespie floated the idea to the
division’s managing director at the
time, but the reaction was only
‘lukewarm’. A few unsuccessful
‘experiments’ hadn’t particularly
endeared the MD to technologydriven
change – even though the last
attempt was around a decade ago.
To support his case, Gillespie
approached an app development
house to put together a prototype
app, called ClipApp, for agents’
smartphones that he could show
to his management.
‘We built that very cheaply and I
brought it back to show the group
12 information-age.com September 15