Nimble, one of Australia’s first disruptive lenders, has a vision to make finance faster. But with a significant pivot to that vision in the last year, CEO, Gavin Slater has sought to transform the company out of short term lending into a truly customer-centric fintech.
Transformation is never easy, particularly at the speed needed to compete in Australia’s thriving fintech ecosystem. ThoughtWorks partnered with Nimble over a seven month period to provide product delivery coordination and technical excellence to build a new credit product, Nimble AnyTime.
A rapidly evolving fintech sector
Speed and innovation have always been at the forefront of Nimble’s strategy. It was the first to bring to market paperless applications in 2009 and Straight-Through Processing (STP) in 2011. However, as with many successful startups, growth has not come without accumulating technical debt, hampering the opportunity for further innovation and scale.
In parallel, in the last two years Australia has seen enormous fragmentation in financial services with the rise of specialist Loantechs, Fintechs and Neobanks. These new entrants have supercharged the industry offering customers convenience and speed to digitally engage and access services that are tailored for them. This has only amplified the increasing customer expectations set by other digital services that everything should be instant, easy and personalised.
With a strong brand, customer base and credit data set, Nimble needed to live up to its name and respond fast, whilst also ensuring that it was doing the right thing for its customers. In 2019, the company set out to realise their vision to transition out of payday loans. Instead, Nimble would extend its credit decisioning expertise, and pivot to offer new products to a near prime, digitally savvy customer audience, who were underwhelmed by traditional lenders.
The way forward through collaboration over creation
In order to move quickly and ensure Nimble focused on its core business, rather than trying to build and own the entire solution stack - a strategy that often mires large enterprises in years of fruitless delivery - they alternatively curated product and platform partners to collaborate with.
Nimble chose Mambu for its general ledger; Illion for bank feeds, eKYC and fraud/credit checking; EML for their credit card payments engine; SplitPayments for real-time payments gateway; AWS for cloud infrastructure. To name a few of the many integrations, each was selected by balancing the suitability and utility of the service, developer experience, and modularity.
Differentiation would be provided through tightly integrating these services and delivering a seamless customer experience that lived up to Nimble’s brand promise.