SocietyOne rapidly flattens 2000% Covid hardship spike through award-winning tech
Australia’s pioneering marketplace lender, SocietyOne, has successfully flattened a 2000 per cent spike in hardships caused by COVID-19 after developing and implementing a tech solution in less than 5 days to manage the surge of hardship requests.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, SocietyOne had been dealing with around 1 hardship request per day.
Lockdowns drove this number to over 100 each day for over 6 weeks, initially pushing hardship response time from 48 hours to 5+ days.
In response, SocietyOne rapidly mobilised a cross-functional hardship response team to investigate and identify drivers of the surge, pain points in the hardship request process, and what its customers truly needed in response.
The resulting solution leveraged SocietyOne’s innovation capabilities, replacing the existing manual process with a new digital solution accompanied by over-the-phone hardship support, automated data entry, new repayment solutions appropriate for COVID-19 scenarios, and increased delegation to front-line staff.
As a result, SocietyOne flattened the 2000 per cent hardship processing spike in less than a week and is now back down to around 2 hardship requests per day, with 95 per cent of customers resuming repayments, and only 0.5 per cent still on deferred repayments.
SocietyOne’s rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic also ensured it maintained a 5 per cent p.a. return for investors in its personal loans unit trust, whilst growing the funds under management by 24 per cent in the last six months. As COVID-19 and economic conditions have improved, originations are now returning to pre-COVID-19 levels.
SocietyOne CEO, Mark Jones, said, “When COVID-19 hit and we saw our customers were being impacted, we knew we had to act quickly to help. Consumer credit is an area particularly affected by the pandemic, so all consumer credit providers had great responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of their customers.
“Our key goal in addressing the hardship surge was to provide care, empathy, and supportive actions for our customers, while simultaneously protecting SocietyOne’s credit quality for our investors.
“We are extremely pleased with the results of our fast action in the form of significantly reduced hardship numbers, and in the personal feedback we’ve received from many thankful customers who wrote to tell us how grateful they were to have been supported during the crisis,” concluded Mr. Jones.
SocietyOne was recently awarded 2nd in the AFR Most Innovative Companies List for ‘Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services’ for this COVID-19 hardship response.
