Blender Financial Group
Salesforce customer since 2014
75 employees
75 employees
1000
Serving customers per employee
PRODUCTS USED
Salesforce helps Blender Financial Technologies become the world's most efficient digital lender.
Is it possible to build a core lending platform on a CRM system?
That’s the question Boaz Aviv, CTO of digital lending company Blender Financial Technology and the company’s other co-founders asked themselves in 2013.
“We knew we needed to be digital, highly efficient and customer-focused to compete in the digital lending space,” says Aviv. “Salesforce was far from the obvious choice for a platform to build a lending business on – but we thought it was the best technology stack to scale an efficient, competitive and customer-centric offering.”
Aviv and his co-founders knew that Salesforce is more than just a CRM system. It’s a flexible foundation of customer-first technologies. By customising and integrating Salesforce solutions like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Shield and Tableau CRM, Blender has managed to do something truly innovative: set up a digital lending platform on Salesforce.
And while the journey to build its lending business on Salesforce hasn’t always been a straight line, today Aviv and the Blender team sees it as the wisest IT decision the company ever made.
That’s the question Boaz Aviv, CTO of digital lending company Blender Financial Technology and the company’s other co-founders asked themselves in 2013.
“We knew we needed to be digital, highly efficient and customer-focused to compete in the digital lending space,” says Aviv. “Salesforce was far from the obvious choice for a platform to build a lending business on – but we thought it was the best technology stack to scale an efficient, competitive and customer-centric offering.”
Aviv and his co-founders knew that Salesforce is more than just a CRM system. It’s a flexible foundation of customer-first technologies. By customising and integrating Salesforce solutions like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Shield and Tableau CRM, Blender has managed to do something truly innovative: set up a digital lending platform on Salesforce.
And while the journey to build its lending business on Salesforce hasn’t always been a straight line, today Aviv and the Blender team sees it as the wisest IT decision the company ever made.
Blender’s efficiency imperative.
Blender is a global Fintech company providing innovative credit and responsible financing solutions to tens of thousands of customers according to their preferences and needs. The company focuses on the fast-growing fields of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) and Auto Loans. Using its proprietary technology, Blender enables a fast and simple shopping experience for both e-Commerce and point of sale transactions. The company acts to expand its digital lending services further and is poised to realise its growth potential in the upcoming years.
Blender is currently active in 4 countries (Israel, the Baltics, Italy) and expanding further to Poland and Central Europe. The company has a community of 430,000 registered users, 35,000 paying users and disbursed over NIS 730 million of loans. It won numerous global prizes and competitions and just completed an IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Customers typically apply for a Blender loan at the point of purchase for a high-price item – like a car or a vacation. That builds a lot of complexity and urgency into every application. Borrowers aren’t willing to wait days or weeks for approval – loans need to be processed and assessed both quickly and in high volumes to ensure Blender’s profitability.
Performance is critical because competition is high. Blender’s retail partners often offer their customers a range of low interest financing options at the point of purchase – so the company is usually in direct competition with several other digital lenders.
“Our aim is to be the first option for customer payments at every store,” says Aviv. “We have to offer the fastest, most reliable and most convenient, customer-friendly service out there. That puts a huge emphasis on efficiency – which is ultimately driven by technology.”
Blender is currently active in 4 countries (Israel, the Baltics, Italy) and expanding further to Poland and Central Europe. The company has a community of 430,000 registered users, 35,000 paying users and disbursed over NIS 730 million of loans. It won numerous global prizes and competitions and just completed an IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Customers typically apply for a Blender loan at the point of purchase for a high-price item – like a car or a vacation. That builds a lot of complexity and urgency into every application. Borrowers aren’t willing to wait days or weeks for approval – loans need to be processed and assessed both quickly and in high volumes to ensure Blender’s profitability.
Performance is critical because competition is high. Blender’s retail partners often offer their customers a range of low interest financing options at the point of purchase – so the company is usually in direct competition with several other digital lenders.
“Our aim is to be the first option for customer payments at every store,” says Aviv. “We have to offer the fastest, most reliable and most convenient, customer-friendly service out there. That puts a huge emphasis on efficiency – which is ultimately driven by technology.”
Thousands of data points – through a single-screen interface.
Blender has used Salesforce products, the Salesforce platform and the integrations the platform supports through Heroku to build an extraordinarily performant and efficient lending service. Today, the company can assess an application in just 30 seconds.
What makes this pace so impressive is the sheer volume of data involved in each and every transaction.
“Digital lenders assess thousands of customers a day,” explains Aviv. “In the peer-to-peer lending space, a single loan could be funded by 1000 separate lenders, each requiring dozens of repayments. A single loan can easily generate 100,000 records. Now multiply that by thousands, every day. We’re talking about millions of data records here.”
While performance and efficiency at massive scale was obviously a key requirement for Blender’s back-end, usability (both for operators and customers) was critical to its CX vision. Aviv knew Blender needed a digital platform that would not only allow automated processing of huge reams of data, but would also make it easy for its operators to work with that data. This would give Blender a crucial edge over other digital lenders limited by a tech stack composed of traditional banking systems.
“We knew that adopting Salesforce as our platform would give our operators a single-screen interface to view all relevant data and take all necessary actions, rather than having to cycle between half a dozen systems,” says Aviv.
“Plus, we knew that as a cloud-based, customer-focused stack, Salesforce could be easily adapted to our CX requirements as our business evolved – and wouldn’t require putting a team of IT administrators on our payroll just to keep it running.”
What makes this pace so impressive is the sheer volume of data involved in each and every transaction.
“Digital lenders assess thousands of customers a day,” explains Aviv. “In the peer-to-peer lending space, a single loan could be funded by 1000 separate lenders, each requiring dozens of repayments. A single loan can easily generate 100,000 records. Now multiply that by thousands, every day. We’re talking about millions of data records here.”
While performance and efficiency at massive scale was obviously a key requirement for Blender’s back-end, usability (both for operators and customers) was critical to its CX vision. Aviv knew Blender needed a digital platform that would not only allow automated processing of huge reams of data, but would also make it easy for its operators to work with that data. This would give Blender a crucial edge over other digital lenders limited by a tech stack composed of traditional banking systems.
“We knew that adopting Salesforce as our platform would give our operators a single-screen interface to view all relevant data and take all necessary actions, rather than having to cycle between half a dozen systems,” says Aviv.
“Plus, we knew that as a cloud-based, customer-focused stack, Salesforce could be easily adapted to our CX requirements as our business evolved – and wouldn’t require putting a team of IT administrators on our payroll just to keep it running.”
With great customer growth comes great customer data.
Blender has leveraged the Salesforce platform’s flexibility to build an operating system for the business – with extensive customisations via the AppExchange as well as internal integration projects.
“This was a big challenge, for sure,” says Aviv. “But while it might have been easier for us if we’d built our stack from typical off-the-shelf solutions, we wouldn’t have been able to strike the same balance between performance and efficiency. And that would have caused us more problems in the long run.”
Blender's decision to build a lending platform using a customer-first digital platform quickly paid off, in both efficiency and customer satisfaction. But as the company grew to become one of the leading digital lenders in the world, it ran into a new challenge: massive volumes of customer data that took the performance requirements to new levels.
“As we grew, so did the volume of data we processed. We built our platform to maintain performance at scale – but that’s a challenge you never stop solving,” says Aviv. “In 2019 we reached a critical growth point where we needed to process and report on data at a rate and speed we hadn’t anticipated.”
“This was a big challenge, for sure,” says Aviv. “But while it might have been easier for us if we’d built our stack from typical off-the-shelf solutions, we wouldn’t have been able to strike the same balance between performance and efficiency. And that would have caused us more problems in the long run.”
Blender's decision to build a lending platform using a customer-first digital platform quickly paid off, in both efficiency and customer satisfaction. But as the company grew to become one of the leading digital lenders in the world, it ran into a new challenge: massive volumes of customer data that took the performance requirements to new levels.
“As we grew, so did the volume of data we processed. We built our platform to maintain performance at scale – but that’s a challenge you never stop solving,” says Aviv. “In 2019 we reached a critical growth point where we needed to process and report on data at a rate and speed we hadn’t anticipated.”
An improved, futureproof platform infrastructure.
Working closely with Salesforce architects, Blender moved its customer data to an external database built for real time transaction processing. Using Salesforce Connect, Blender integrated this external data with its core lending operations on Salesforce. Using Salesforce in this way meant the team could access data, in real-time and ensure the customer data was monitored and protected at all times, with Salesforce Shield.
As for the challenge of reporting on data, Blender solved this by implementing Tableau CRM. Thanks to Tableau, Blender can now bring all of its data – from whichever source – together into Salesforce.
“Tableau drives efficiency,” says Aviv. “Our analysts view, manage and report on all of our data from a single place, instead of having to go hunting for it. They can build dashboards to track key KPIs instead of going into Excel to create the same spreadsheet every month. And our management team can make continuous adjustments to our processes based on those KPIs.”
For example, Tableau’s dashboards enable Blender to track approximately 30 different onboarding processes it runs, each tailored to a specific scenario of how a customer approaches them, and tweak them accordingly.
“Onboarding is highly important to our business,” says Aviv. “We have to make customers feel comfortable, confident and respected – even if we're turning their application down. Tableau makes it easy for us to track our onboarding processes and launch new ones.”
As for the challenge of reporting on data, Blender solved this by implementing Tableau CRM. Thanks to Tableau, Blender can now bring all of its data – from whichever source – together into Salesforce.
“Tableau drives efficiency,” says Aviv. “Our analysts view, manage and report on all of our data from a single place, instead of having to go hunting for it. They can build dashboards to track key KPIs instead of going into Excel to create the same spreadsheet every month. And our management team can make continuous adjustments to our processes based on those KPIs.”
For example, Tableau’s dashboards enable Blender to track approximately 30 different onboarding processes it runs, each tailored to a specific scenario of how a customer approaches them, and tweak them accordingly.
“Onboarding is highly important to our business,” says Aviv. “We have to make customers feel comfortable, confident and respected – even if we're turning their application down. Tableau makes it easy for us to track our onboarding processes and launch new ones.”
World-leading efficiency.
Although Blender’s decision to use Salesforce as the core of its lending platform has presented the company with some challenges over the years, Aviv believes it has also helped give them a winning edge.
“Building our business on Salesforce means we’re probably one of the most efficient consumer lending companies in the world,” he says. “We’re operating at a ratio of 1000 paying customers per operator. To put that in perspective, traditional financial institutions usually have a ratio of between 200 and 500 customers per operator.”
“We’re now moving into digital banking, and we’re seeing that those institutions are still working on – and struggling with – those same old Stone Age technologies,” Aviv says. “We’ve definitely got a huge advantage now because we chose the right stack as our foundations.”
“Building our business on Salesforce means we’re probably one of the most efficient consumer lending companies in the world,” he says. “We’re operating at a ratio of 1000 paying customers per operator. To put that in perspective, traditional financial institutions usually have a ratio of between 200 and 500 customers per operator.”
“We’re now moving into digital banking, and we’re seeing that those institutions are still working on – and struggling with – those same old Stone Age technologies,” Aviv says. “We’ve definitely got a huge advantage now because we chose the right stack as our foundations.”
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