With ABCUL about to start and the incuto roadmap for 2020 well underway, our CEO Andrew Rabbitt talks progress to date and what’s in store for Q2.
”Back in November, we announced incuto’s roadmap for 2020 including new partnerships and launches designed to enhance services to you and, ultimately, your Members. We’ve had a busy start to the year and I’m really excited to update you on our news and milestones in Q1 2020. We’re also kick-starting our regular incuto WebEx this month, providing an opportunity for credit unions and community banks to speak to our team, get updates and ask questions.
“In Q1, we said we would deliver:
Open Banking – in January, we successfully launched Open Banking, in partnership with Experian, allowing credit unions to collect Member’s bank data during the loan application journey, to speed up analysis of bank statements. We’ll be running a workshop in March looking specifically at Open Banking and how we can improve the presentation of data to better support you and your Members
Automated Decisions – in February, we successfully launched our beta version of Automated Decisioning, allowing you to create rules over Credit Reference data, Open Banking data and your own historical data about a Member, all in one place. This is being continuously enhanced with more rules and functionality and is now available to all customers. We’ll be running a workshop in April, looking specifically at Automated Decisioning and how we can enhance the rules to speed up decisions
Incuto Hub / Xero integration – we’re excited to announce we’ll be testing our new back-office platform with a number of Credit Unions in March. This means for the first time, incuto will be the key system of record. We’ve engaged the services of accountancy Alexander Sloan to support testing, alongside selected credit unions who will test the functionality and usability of the system. Although we won’t be announcing the credit unions we have engaged in this process, we are looking forward to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the coming months when we roll this out to everyone
We are delighted to announce the launch of Faster Payments, with ClearBank, which was originally scheduled for Q2, and due to high demand has been brought forward. Our ClearBank integration means credit unions can partially or fully automate Faster Payments, allowing withdrawals and loans to be paid out in seconds, improving member experience and hugely reducing workload and cost.
In addition, ClearBank will be able to support payment collection by Direct Debit, as well as Virtual Banking Services, which means being able to issue bank account and sort-code to every Member. Not only does this allow you to offer financially excluded Members proper banking facilities, it also means that we can automatically and instantly reconcile payments (e.g. benefits payments) to their accounts, without manual processing. For credit unions who offer family or child benefit loans, this means no more reference number lookups and the ability to secure incoming payments to a unique account number, reducing the risk that the member stops payments in.
“Our Strategy for 2020:
“We’re looking forward to seeing lots of you this week at ABCUL and throughout the year as we rollout incuto. Over the next 12 months, our focus will be on:
Stability of both the platform and the business, which is done by ensuring our growing number of Credit Union customers have been delivered to, in full
Reliability, by delivering on our promises, on-time and in full. It’s tough, because we always want to say yes, but we know it’s just as important not to let you down
Scalability and capacity of the team and the platform, which means growing the team, ensuring we have the capacity to deliver on our promises. To do this sustainably, we have to make sure our existing customers are live and able to use the platform
Prioritisation, which means asking you for your input on what we do next.
Community, which means setting up the incuto community co-operative, which every Credit Union on our platform will be part of, to formalise our prioritisation and support, but also to protect our community in the event of any issues, including business continuity.
“As always, it’s an honour and a pleasure to be working with you all, and on behalf of the whole, expanding incuto team, a massive thank you for trusting us to deliver services to your members.”
Andrew Rabbitt, CEO, incuto