Temenos helps UK banks speed up BBLS distribution "in days"

Temenos helps UK banks speed up BBLS distribution “in days”

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
12th May 2020

Temenos, a Swiss banking software provider, is allowing UK banks to roll out its Infinity Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution “in days” to speed up their distribution of loans under the government’s Bounce Bank Loan Scheme (BBLS) which launched last week.

The firm, which works with more than 3,000 banks worldwide, has spent the last few weeks upgrading Infinity with a digital loan application portal and workflow process specifically designed for the UK’s BBLS and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).

UK banks have seen a surge in demand for BBLS loans. NatWest said it received 65,000 applications in the first 48 hours, Barclays said it approved 32,000 loans in just the first few days, and Lloyds said it also delivered more than 32,000 loans in the same time period, worth more than £1 billion.

The solution is designed to ease the stress on banks’ call centres

NatWest’s managing director for government schemes and external partnerships, Kate Dickins, says the bank has seen “an unprecedented number of digital applications”.

“If we look at our call centres, it’s a lowball to say we have double the traffic that we normally do,” Dickins told The Fintech Times.

The loans are designed to help the UK’s smallest, most struggling businesses which were fenced out of the CBILS because of certain application restrictions. The loans are 100% government backed and the highest loan under the scheme which can be issued is £50,000.

Temenos Infinity allows banks to provide a “standardised” digital service which “simplifies” the application process for small businesses and can process “any volume” of loan applications.

The solution is designed to ease the stress on banks’ call centres, which are, as Dickins mentions above, working at least twice their normal capacity.

The banking software provider has also built an Infinity Engage product which acts as a “personal banker service” to allow each bank employee to service “hundreds” of customers.

This is paired with new automated decisioning options through Temenos’ Explainable AI (XAI), which the firmed rolled out in April ahead of America’s second round of the Paycheck Protection Programme (PPP).

The new options are designed to help UK banks explain “in plain language” to their small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers and regulators how any artificial intelligence-driven decisions are taken.

“During a very similar SMB lending initiative in the US, it was capabilities like Temenos’ that enabled an army of lending institutions get capital into the hands of millions small businesses struggling as a result of COVID-19,” says Aite Group’s senior analyst David O’Connell.