 "Jürgen Späder, Chief Technology Officer Lending at FERNBACH-Software")
Interview with Jürgen Späder
Jürgen Späder, Chief Technology Officer Lending at FERNBACH-Software, discusses FERNBACH’s flexible Lending application, which is already live at over 30,000 workstations. He also explains how this solution provides banks with the ideal way to adapt the software to meet their own specific needs and, thus, enable them to plan and invest more reliably.
The term Suite Composer is often used in conjunction with (FERNBACH’s) Lending application. What exactly is it? It sounds like a kind of component kit, which could be associated with an incomplete solution. How would you address this issue?
Jürgen Späder: Let’s look at the question from a different angle. A bank has a customer who manufactures electric scooters and this bank is involved in financing the purchase of these products. The conditions stipulate that the scooters may only be sold by an authorised dealer, that the scooters undergo regular inspection and that owners must take out a special liability insurance policy etc.
Another example would be a bank that provides loans through a grocery store where customers can use their store cards to take out a loan for up to 7,500 USD per purchase right at the cash register.
There are thousands of special financing strategies that are often specially adapted to various channels, customer groups and products. Very often, financing is also used as a promotional tool to drive sales: ‘Buy now and make your first payment in two years.’
And that is exactly the purpose of the Suite Composer: it brings specially-tailored lending products to market quickly and efficiently.
Our software is designed so that we can build a comprehensive lending/financing product using existing FlexFinance functions. That product is then tailored to meet each customer’s unique needs.
We can even hold a demonstration of our software where we put together a finished lending software solution in just one hour.
So no, this is not a half-finished product – it’s ready-made.
How exactly should banks proceed with the workflow for FlexFinance and what advantages will ensue for those banks?
Jürgen Späder: The programme features a special automated workflow or, preferably, a process flow. This process flow will not, for instance, calculate the interest amount until the capital and the deal term have been defined. The process flow also allows customers to access their own processes at the click of a mouse; such as their own payments.
The workflow makes sure that the loan file goes through all the necessary steps automatically – from desk to desk and from employee to employee. It is also completely integrated into a bank’s organisation, providing the employees with their access rights, working areas and tasks.
The FlexFinance workflow functions as follows: The loan application is filed and if the amount applied for is extraordinarily high or for special customers, the system automatically sends this loan to the authorised employee’s task list. The employee is then automatically notified.
A workflow can double the value of any program. Our customers are also free to adapt the workflow to best fit their respective organisations.
We once installed FlexFinance in a bank where we had to interface with 22 third-party software providers and outsourcing partners. The bank drafted the workflow and the employees received their tasks through the task list. The entire workflow was completely integrated and, in this case, we used all of our customer’s existing databases.
And what happens if a bank already has a workflow system?
Will FlexFinance replace it?
Jürgen Späder: Frankly, that is neither our policy nor our intention. FlexFinance has an integrated workflow system, but our goal is to work with the system that a bank already has in place. Banks are not compelled to install our procedure. We chose an open source workflow system so that we can provide our customers with a template as a starting point.
Given that a bank does not want a new database or a new computer system, is maintaining a double data set not too expensive?
Jürgen Späder: That’s the advantage of the FlexFinance Lending concept. New processes and workflows can be implemented without having to replace any existing systems and databases. Think of FlexFinance as a kind of spider’s web that links the existing systems and draws on their data. However, these connections then transport the data into new work packages and transfer them as a workflow – work packages travelling from one workstation to the next.
