Bristol-based specialist start-up Flexys has launched an innovative product designed to help lenders and borrowers collaborate to avoid mounting debt.
The debt management software company, based at UWE Bristol’s Future Space tech and science innovation hub, has created a research and innovation team Flexys Labs, which is working on projects to incorporate sentiment analysis, machine learning, and new PSD2 open banking standards into its core platform.
It aims to sign up a number of customers this year to use the platform and is targeting banks, building societies, financial services, utility companies, telecoms providers and any businesses which offer large volumes of consumer credit.
Flexys was set up a year ago by Jon Hickman, Brian Smith and Joe Heath to create a market-leading tool that will benefit creditors and their customers by spotting potential problems early and offering fair and sustainable solutions.
Since moving to Future Space on UWE’s Frenchay campus, Flexys has secured first round of capital from angel investors.
This has allowed the team to grow to 16 since September alone, including recruiting Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction and Scala programming language experts as well as sales and marketing professionals.
After 12 months’ development work, the platform, called Ctrl+C, has been launched and has already been snapped up by Flexys’ first customer.
Ctrl+C will eventually offer everything from front-end digital services to call centre management.
CEO Jon Hickman, who has 30 years’ experience working for debt collection software companies, said: “We’ve created a debt management platform for the digital age which seeks to help lenders work with their customers in a collaborative way.
“Traditional debt management systems promote an adversarial and one-dimensional view of customers in arrears.
“This can end up with skewed and potentially unfair outcomes with customers being offered solutions that are not helpful because of the incomplete or biased information available to the creditor.
“We’ve created a self-service platform to help the customers work together with businesses to resolve their debt issues.”
The solution requests access to a customer’s bank account, using open banking standards and with the customer’s permission it then collects and analyses all their transactions to calculate an accurate monthly disposable income figure.
From this the system can formulate a sustainable repayment plan. The banking details are not shared with anyone, including the lender, but are used purely to help the borrower reach a repayment agreement they can adhere to.
Customers can make their repayment easily online, removing the hassle and embarrassment traditionally associated with taking debt management calls.
Flexys’s data projects use machine learning and sentiment analysis to pick up on certain behaviour patterns. The same technology can alert companies when a customer looks likely to default on payment, so they can provide the necessary support and advice as early as possible.
Jon added: “We’ve built a solution for creditors which will allow them to better understand both their customer’s emotional and financial position, so they can treat them as three dimensional human beings rather than just numbers on a balance sheet.
“Ultimately this will lead to fairer, more sustainable outcomes for everyone involved.”
Pictured: The Flexys team at Future Space
