Summary
Shawbrook, an award-winning specialist lender in the United Kingdom, experienced remarkable growth and had promising business opportunities for further expansion. To capitalize on these opportunities, the client focused on tackling critical business goals, including improving cross-selling initiatives, streamlining underwriting processes, and optimizing data management strategies.
To address scalability challenges, Shawbrook sought the expertise of SoftServe, initiating an ongoing partnership. SoftServe's team worked on various projects to modernize infrastructure, optimize data management, and improve customer insights. Over the years, the collaboration between Shawbrook and SoftServe has fostered a synergistic relationship.
“This partnership is a great example of our best-of-both business strategy, where we combine the best technology with deep human expertise, to give our customers a first-class experience.”
Russ Thornton, Shawbrook CTO
Background
Shawbrook is a specialist lender in the U.K., serving real estate professionals, SMEs, and consumers with a broad range of lending products and secure savings options. With over 425,000 customers, a £11.9 billion loan book, and £12.1 billion in customer savings, Shawbrook experienced rapid growth and needed technical expertise to scale accordingly.
The initiatives undertaken with the help of SoftServe, such as streamlining underwriting processes, creating a single customer view, and optimizing data management, significantly improved the efficiency and productivity of the bank. This allows the bank to process customer requests faster, reducing operational costs and increasing revenue. Further, improved data governance is crucial to enhance regulatory compliance, protect reputation, and mitigate risk.
The need to change
The bank's legacy IT infrastructure led to significant costs in data management, regulatory reporting, and EoD operations. The rapid growth of Shawbrook's business resulted in several pressing challenges, including:
- Lack of central cloud data storage: The bank lacked a centralized cloud data storage solution that could synchronize customer data from various systems.
- Slow underwriting process: Manual underwriting processes resulted in delays, with customer credit risk exposure taking up to one working day to determine.
- Cross-selling challenges: The bank faced difficulties in cross-selling its banking products due to data silos and a lack of comprehensive customer insights.
A greater scope required SoftServe to expand its team from the initial data focus team to include the addition of experts in business analysis, data architecture, and overall project management capabilities to drive multiple streams with the highest efficiency for the client.
Value delivered
SoftServe partnered with Shawbrook to become a trusted party in delivering top-quality data engineering services and bringing to the table the best-in-class expertise across several projects to address Shawbrook's needs. Flexibility, competence, scalability, and a client-centric approach were key in this cooperation as the project expanded and ultimately led to the development of a new data management platform. One that provides near real-time data to enhance decision-making and cost optimization.
“SoftServe is passionate and committed! All SoftServe colleagues come well-trained and prepared in their designated tasks and they truly think like owners, not afraid to tackle difficult problems.”
Shan Lodh, Shawbrook Director of Data Platform
Some of the key projects included:
- Single customer view project
- Unified customer data, providing a clearer understanding of the client’s business and credit risk.
- Reduced underwriting process duration from 2–3 working days to 1 working day.
- Implemented a recommending engine for the sales team.
- Consumer lending platform
- An ongoing project developing and honing an advanced decision engine within the consumer lending platform to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of loan eligibility assessments.
- Salesforce optimization
- This ongoing program focuses on optimizing opportunity and order management processes for financial products using Salesforce. The aim is to streamline operations and improve efficiency in handling financial transactions and requests.
The scope also included data management and product development projects that were aimed at enhancing business intelligence and included:
- BI project
- An ongoing project that improved KYC processes, the finalisation of transaction monitoring reports, and an amalgamated “super-transaction” pipeline across multiple payment providers.
- Data platform
- Leveraged Python and SQL to enhance property estimations and data analytics, providing valuable insights to support informed decision-making.
- PowerBI project
- Created impactful data visualizations and a diverse range of reports using PowerBI. This empowers data-driven decision-making and insights.
- Next Generation underwriting project
- There is an ongoing effort aimed at optimizing real-estate underwriting processes. Through the implementation of automation and data consolidation, this initiative seeks to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of underwriting operations, ensuring quicker and more accurate assessments.
Shawbrook appreciated the proactive role of SoftServe experts in guiding clients on the path to accelerating their business, particularly through the modernization of their data platform. SoftServe delivered productivity improvements, process optimization, and cost savings for Shawbrook — resulting in a significant return on investment. Specific outcomes include:
- Elimination of data preparation time for regulatory reporting, reducing a weekly process to a few days.
- Improved underwriting, risk management, and product generation processes.
- Reduced data incidents from 150–180 per month to 2–5 per month.
- Increased loan origination application conversion.
- Enhanced cross-selling and upselling with a full bank-wide view of customers.
- Improved visibility with PowerBI dashboards.
- Upcoming launch of improved Shawbrook's independent savings digital platform.
By partnering with SoftServe, Shawbrook modernized its infrastructure, streamlined processes, and positioned itself for continued growth and innovation. The trusted and mutually beneficial relationship has been reinforced over time. It has not only paved the way for our shared success but has also prospered into a strong and enduring partnership.
