Background
With over 650,000 customers, Cattles is one of the largest providers of financial services products to the non-standard consumer credit market in the UK. The company’s consumer division comprises Progressive Financial Services Ltd., (incorporating Welcome Financial Services and Shopacheck Financial Services), Progressive Insurance Company Ltd., Welcome Car Finance and The Lewis Group.
Welcome Financial Services (WFS) is based in Nottingham and has over 250 branches located throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. WFS provides a range of products, including unsecured personal loans, hire purchase and secured loans, to customers who don’t have access to mainstream credit facilities, or if they do, choose not to use them.
The Challenge
Welcome Financial Services has been growing at a rate of between 10 and 20 per cent year on year. 1500 staff at the company’s branches and central processing units were using an Oracle application processing system (APS) to register loan requests, which in 2002 the company decided to upgrade in order to meet the demands of its continuing expansion.
The APS was linked to a 3rd party credit checking application running on the central mainframe via gateways from an existing supplier, which enabled the two systems to communicate with one another. However each gateway was slow, and following the upgrade of the Oracle APS package, it became clear that a new, faster and more efficient solution was needed.
The Solution
After assessing a number of possible suppliers, WFS approached Modcomp to build a new gateway solution was awarded.
Using its middleware integration technology, ViewMax, Modcomp developed a bespoke gateway application to connect the new Oracle APS system with the 3rd party credit checking application on the company’s mainframe. Within 4 months Modcomp’s technology was ready to be installed on site, and after successful tests, it went live less than 6 months after the project started.
Conclusion
The new Modcomp gateway has substantially increased performance and capacity and is able to manage more than a 10-fold increase in the volume of requests from WFS staff, helping to significantly speed up the turnaround of loan requests, some of which can now be automatically approved. Welcome Financial Services staff now process over 600,000 loan requests every year and the increased gateway capacity is specifically designed to give the entire system room for growth as the business continues to expand.
Malcolm Hawley, IT Project Manager at WFS, said: “We are very pleased with the system Modcomp designed for us, which has helped improve the overall efficiency of the application processing system. Connection to our credit checking facility is now much faster enabling our staff to deal with more customer requests, more quickly.”
“Modcomp was very reactive to our needs, and proved to be a very efficient supplier. The technology is excellent and Modcomp staff have been a pleasure to work with.”
About Modcomp
Founded in 1970, MODCOMP has been providing data acquisition and system integration solutions for over thirty years, to a wide variety of markets as diverse as retail, financial, government, aerospace, energy, utilities, factory automation, broadcast and communications. Modcomp is an international company with a world-class reputation for bringing quality, high-performance innovations to its customers.