Financial Transformation Summit 2025 EXCLUSIVE

At the Financial Transformation Summit, Seema Desai, COO at iwoca, spoke on a panel (alongside representatives from Zopa Bank and Citibank) about the shifting needs for customer experience in digital lending. How can lenders create hyper-personalised loan products to meet diverse customer needs? What are the best practices for maintaining a human touch in automated lending processes? How can lenders build and maintain customer loyalty in a competitive market? What role does omnichannel strategy play in delivering a seamless lending experience?

Following the panel, we spoke with Seema to find out more…

Hi Seema, tell us about your role at iwoca?

“I am the Chief Operating Officer at iwoca. We provide fast and flexible finance to small businesses across the UK and Germany. In my role as COO, I’m responsible for all of our UK operations teams. So, all of our agents that engage with customers throughout the customer journey. And I make sure that we’re offering a really high quality service that is also highly efficient.”

You were part of a panel at this Summit focused on redefining CX in the era of digital lending. Can you give us an overview of your thoughts?

“So, maintaining that personal touch is really important because that personal touch helps us to build trust with our customers. We all know that when dealing with money, that trust element is super important. There’s lots of things that iwoca does to maintain that. For example, every customer has a dedicated account manager. They can get through to them via a direct number. We also respond to emails fast, every email on the same day. And then we commit to answering at least 80% of calls in less than 60 seconds. We’ve got 10,000 new applications every month and about 30,000 customers making repayments currently. We’re doing all of this with an account management team of just 30 people. So, to maintain that level of personal touch whilst also being able to deal with that volume of customers, we absolutely have to leverage digital technology to be able to do that really efficiently. And there’s many ways that we do that…

“First of all, we make sure that our account pages and our signup flow is as clear and seamless as possible so that customers can self-serve if they want to. But we also make sure that with our operations activities, we’ve broken down every step of every operational process into a task that is visible on our in-house built CRM system. And then what we can do is run tests on every single step of those to see where having human interaction really adds the most value. So, we are constantly upgrading where we apply human interaction in a really forensic way to make sure that it’s optimised as much as possible.”

Why is this an exciting time for the business?

“It’s really exciting right now. We’ve been having some record months recently and broken some big milestones. We are now approving around 10,000 new business loans every month, which is huge. Our loan book across the UK is almost £1 billion. And then a bit closer to home, we’ve also just moved offices. We’ve got more space and we’re still able to attract exceptional talent into iwoca and it’s great to have a new home in central London to do that.”

What trends are you seeing across the Financial Services landscape? What will be important for you and your customers?

“Embedded finance is a big trend right now. It’s important for us to make sure that customers can access lending when and where they need it. We’re integrating lots of partners through our open API – around a third of our applications come through partner channels. So, that’s a very important trend and growing for us in the future. We’re also seeing a lot of hyper-personalisation. We know that customers want to be able to tailor loan products exactly to their needs, and we want our products to be able to provide that flexibility to them. We’re looking at increasing loan amounts, changing durations and offering different types of repayment schedules with interest only options. And that’s hugely exciting. And one of the big trends that I’ve heard about here at FTS, and which we are working on at iwoca, is how we leverage AI and what we might be able to do with AI to make us even more efficient, but still maintain an excellent customer service.”

What pain points are your customers experiencing that you need to address? What are they asking you for help with? How are you meeting the challenge?

“So, it’s important to remember that iwoca exists in order to solve pain points for customers because customers were just relying on traditional lenders. Those traditional lenders, the big banks, have much longer application processes, typically taking weeks and sometimes just aren’t able to lend to those customers at all because it’s not within their risk appetite. Whereas at iwoca you can get a loan within minutes. We can also lend to customers that banks couldn’t lend to because we’re able to use data and data science to be able to understand the risk level and different customers much better.”

Tell us about a recent success story…

“We are operational in the UK and Germany, and a success story for us is the fact that we are now working with a loan book of almost a £1 billion and we are profitable. And we have been for quite a while now, since early 2023. So, it’s a real success story for us that we’re able to use that profitability to fund our core business growth but also use it to invest in solving other pain points for customers beyond lending.”

What’s next for iwoca? What future launches and initiatives are you particularly excited about?

“Yeah, there’s a lot of things that we’re working on right now. I’m excited about some of the AI tools that we are trialling to make our service even more efficient. There’s a number of exciting applications out there, so there’s a lot of people at iwoca exploring and exploiting different AI technologies. It’s going to be very exciting to see how that rolls out across our business in the rest of this year. And then also looking at new ventures that are beyond lending, which we may be launching later this year or early next.”

Why do you think the evolution of collaboration between banks and FinTechs is set to continue? What are you excited about?

“Collaboration is hugely important to us and our business model. Traditional banks are able to access capital more cheaply than we can, but they’re able to provide us with access to their balance sheet so that they provide financing to us so that we can then lend to our customers. So, with their financing, we are able to use our data and our technology to reach customers that they wouldn’t be able to reach directly. At the moment, something like 80% of our funding comes from banks such as Barclays and Citi. So, they’re hugely important to us and we are continuously reviewing with them the performance of our own book and finding ways that we’d be able to lend to more of our customers.”

Why Financial Transformation Summit? What is it about this particular event that makes it the perfect place to embrace innovation? What’s the response been like for iwoca?

“This is my first time at this event, and I’ve been really impressed. It’s been really well organised and the panels have been insightful with some great speakers. I’ve learned quite a lot. I’ve met some really interesting people and I’m really impressed by the diversity of people that are coming here. So, I was just on a panel with somebody from Zopa, which is where I used to work. I also met somebody in the audience who came from Lloyd’s, which is where I worked about 15 years ago. So, it’s great to see that this ecosystem being brought together at FTS.”

Learn more at iwoca.co.uk

About iwoca

Fast, flexible finance empowers small businesses to manage their cash flow better and seize opportunities – making their business and the economy stronger as a whole. At iwoca, we do just that. We help businesses get the funds they need, when they need it, often within minutes. We’ve already made several billion pounds in funding available to over 100,000 businesses since we launched in 2012 and positioned ourselves as a leading Fintech in Europe. Our mission is to finance one million businesses. We’ll get there by continuing to make our finance ever more relevant and accessible to more businesses by combining cutting-edge technology, data science and a 5-star customer service.