Arman Tahmassebi, COO of LendInvest, explains how streamlining operations and removing friction from the UK’s property finance market will usher in new disruptors.

Tell us about the COO role at LendInvest?

I oversee our operations, product, and technology teams. A large part of my role is to ensure we’re using best of breed technology to become as efficient as possible, with a frictionless, end-to-end customer journey. And by customer, I don’t just mean the external customers, such as the brokers and borrowers, but internal stakeholders too. It’s ensuring that through using our tools all users have a fantastic experience.

How is LendInvest different from traditional property finance lenders?

We’re a technology-led property lending platform that isn’t weighed down by the by legacy issues faced by the more traditional lenders. From our cloud-based infrastructure to our micro-service platform architecture everything we do is designed to allow us to be agile in our approach.

Traditionally, a loan application process would involve the customer downloading a PDF, filling it out, and then it could take up to two months for the provider just to decide whether or not to make an offer. By combining the power of our own proprietary technology together with benefits of partnerships with market-leading cloud-based technology providers, we’ve digitised that process and so within minutes the customer can submit their loan application. This is then automatically submitted to our administrative teams.

We’ve built our own proprietary technology, integrating third party data such as land registry, credit bureau, and risk ratings, to help paint a 360-degree picture of the customer. This enables our team to understand what the customer is looking for and make quick and informed decisions on those cases. 

And being cloud-based presumably helped when COVID-19 hit?

Absolutely. It allowed us to be flexible. Like everyone else, we went into crisis mode in March 2020 and from an operational standpoint, it was about being able to keep the business going.

The first thing was getting our team operational and comfortable from a home set-up. Being cloud-based and the strength of our technology allowed that to happen seamlessly. The power of our technology not only helped us cope with that but also helped us deal with increased demand as we hit record volume levels. We've not only been able to adapt to a new way of working, but we’ve been able to cope with unprecedented volumes during the past year, and scale accordingly.

In your digital process is there much need for human interaction?

We’re a specialist lender. Our customers appreciate there is still a need for human interaction and expertise. In our sector, more often than not, there is a complicated aspect to the loan which requires that human touch.

That said, data is at the heart of what we do as a company. We gather thousands of data points against each loan to build a thorough picture of our customers. Our sales team has a detailed, multi-dimensional view of everything that our customers are doing, what they are interested in, what they have been interested in, where they are in their journey with us, and so on. This gives us a really good understanding of our customers and through analysing that data we can make far better decisions internally as a company.

How does Salesforce fit in?

LendInvest has been a Salesforce customer for some time now. Personally, I’ve been a customer of Salesforce in every company I've worked in since 2004. Salesforce gives us the framework on which we can easily build our own proprietary technology and also allows integration of third-party technology.

We want to put our customers at the heart of everything we do. Salesforce gives us the ability to be able to get closer to our customers, to understand them, and to communicate with them.

We use Pardot to manage newsletters and communications with our customers, whether that be the borrowers or the brokers. It means we can communicate really effectively and connect at a far more personal level with our customers. We also use Tableau for financial analysis. This enables us to gather a large amount of data that will allow us to build better products, better services, and make better decisions.

The property market is extremely competitive, how do you create a niche?

Generating momentum in this market is all about establishing relationships with our customers and ensuring that our operational processes are industry leading. This is evidenced by our repeat customer rates on our applications. Right now, around 30% of our applications are repeat borrowers. And when they come back to us with another loan application, we welcome them back, knowing who they are, where they are in their journey with us, what information we have on them, and how we can help them to go on this next journey.

Read the full story to see how LendInvest is working with Salesforce to get closer to its customers.