Bankish: An Innovative Platform for Small Lenders

Traditionally, small and medium lending companies have relied on legacy lending systems, which are not only rigid but prove to be outright expensive. Due to the lack of modularity in these systems, the lenders had to purchase the whole system despite requiring merely a subset of the numerous built-in functionalities. Led by finance experts with 25 years of individual experience in the lending expanse, Bankish is on a mission to tackle the long-existing woes of the small and medium lenders. “We are not just another IT startup looking to tap the opportunities in the lending space but a team that knows the financial services industry inside out and has the urge to solve the problems comprehensively,” begins Andrus Alber, co-founder of Bankish. “Using the vast experiences of our core team, we have built an innovative SaaS-based lending platform to meet the unique needs of the lenders and help them improve their decision-making.”

Adopting a new system has remained a costly affair for lenders over the years. Moreover, data migration has been the bane of transformation. Any flaw in the data migration process can have severe repercussions, such as poor business intelligence reports. Bankish’s lending platform not only eliminates the capex in adopting the new system but also simplifies the data migration process. Instead of relying on the traditional programming method for data migration, Bankish uses a proven data mapping methodology for migration, which improves time efficiency.

Besides, the platform can even identify any error in the data before it is transferred into the system, improving system performance.

Using the vast experiences of our core team, we have built an innovative SaaS-based lending platform to meet the unique needs of the lenders and help them improve their decision-making

Built from the ground up in a modular structure, the platform enables the credit provider’s customers to access their data and engage in self-servicing activities. With such agility, lenders can innovate quickly and cost-effectively. In an instance, a multi-market credit provider in Europe was looking to expand its business to Finland with an array of new products. Testing the product using their internal IT resources would have meant the firm investing heavily in terms of time and money for the next 6-12 months. “Bankish enabled the necessary integrations to Finnish databases and established connections with the third-party micro-service providers within just a few months,” says Alber. This case study proves that any lender can confidently assess new markets and products at low operational and cost overhead using Bankish’s off-the-shelf platform.

Bankish remains focused on adding an invoice discounting module to its platform.

Marek Piller, Head of Technology and Product Management
“We have carefully chosen open source technologies and solutions to foster innovation while keeping the cost in check,” says Marek Piller, Head of Technology and Product Management at Bankish.

With such an approach, Bankish takes pride in having achieved a happy clientele. One of these clients is an EU FSA licensed credit provider in Estonia that has expanded its business to new markets with Bankish. The credit provider adopted Bankish’s flexible platform to address its need for a common system for collateral management and customer self-service portal. Apart from simplifying the data migration process, Bankish enabled the client to customise the current product parameters as well as launch new products in virtually minutes. All of the products and their definitions can now be managed easily in the back-office from drop-down menus—no more relying on developers to automate the business process or data entry.

Moving forward, Bankish is planning to automate more of its services and offer innovations within reach to even the smaller players in the market. Operating in the Nordic-Baltic region of Europe, Bankish is aiming to expand its reach into the UK, continental Europe, Japan, and the US soon.