Just about a year ago a new law was implemented in Finland restricting credit finance and short-loans, forcing many companies to vanish into thin air. But MCB Finance who has built their customer company with Salesforce as a platform, is thriving in this changing environment.

“It has been an intense and interesting year, seeing the Group learn and cooperate between countries, sharing ideas and innovate together. For a small company like us, this is the key to everything”, says Jari Koivula, CIO at MCB Finance Group in the Helsinki office.

The company, founded in 2006, is a consumer finance company providing fast, convenient, easily understood and flexible credit solutions under the Credit24-brand to retail customers in five countries. Under the business-to-business-brand Sving in Lithuania, the MCB Finance Group is also offering a payment method for online shops and shoppers.

“We had to build a new system that we could tune to fit both our business-to-business and business-to-consumer-brands, and that narrowed down the list quite a bit.”

Scaling in IT, not in people

“We want to scale in IT, not in people”, Jari Koivula says and continues: “This requires a need for industry standard ready-made and best-of-breed solutions. With Salesforce the base is already built and then we tailor it to fit our needs.”For MCB Finance the new regulation in the Finish market is a good thing, and the company is growing as much as up-to 35 % per year. But growing fast isn’t all fun and games, and it’s creating pressure on both IT and staff.

With Salesforce the company will pull together five different country-specific customer care systems into one. That, along with the classical benefits of the cloud model such as no maintenance, no updates, no servers and better availability; it’s obvious why MCB Finance has chosen their solution.

“It’s not the cloud alone but the content in the cloud that is Salesforce. It saves us a lot of investments in hardware that goes bad anyway, and it’s keeping the Group flexible IT wise, too - especially when we’re growing so fast.”

A system for B2B as well as B2C

MCB Finance started using the classical CRM for their business-to-business brand Sving in Lithuania. It was a pilot to learn and the company quickly expanded to add Service Cloud for their business-to-consumer part in the Credit24-brand.

“Of course we looked at other systems before choosing Salesforce, but the others didn’t have cloud based solutions or were missing the business-to-consumer part. For business-to-business CRM systems there’s an endless world out there, but for business-to-consumer solutions there’s a whole other story”, says Jari Koivula.

“Customer care and the business-to-consumer section is process oriented, you build your own workflow and integrate with your own backend systems. Every company has its own ways. What makes Salesforce different from other systems is that you can tailor it, and not only for customer service, and that is what we did. In the end it’s very easy to use.”

For the Sving-brand, MCB Finance also uses a customer portal build on Lightning, a ready-made portal where the web shop owners using the company’s online payment method, can get an overview on their transactions and statements.

“There are so many things you can do with the toy! We haven’t used it to its full potential yet but I like it, and our customer service is very happy with Salesforce.”

Migrating into Salesforce was easy

With Salesforce, MCB Finance now only has one solution to maintain, and for IT it’s certainly a benefit: a system with a common language and a common concept that you can standardize and tailor for country specific needs.

“That way it’s better organized! It’s like Salesforce is guiding you through the process, telling you what to do next, which makes switching duties and training new people much easier”, says Jari Koivula.

Even migrating into Salesforce was an easy task. He also points out the value of having a system that can be tailored for the specific needs of the business, such as tuning certain units for laws and cultures in the different countries.

“With a lot of things we have group functions and a general knowledge bank, and it will have a great impact on our costumer care process.”

In the business of finance and loans, there will be certain things that are country-specific and can’t be centralized. But with a common language, for instance, a Finish employee is now able to do his or her training in, let’s say, the Lithuanian office, because language is no longer an obstacle.

Automated processes improves business results

“From a customer point of view Salesforce has made all the difference. The idea of the group functions is to have fully automated processes when it comes to customer care. Of course you have to deliver certain thing if it’s required, but the rest of the process is transparent and automated for the customer. And of course, this leads to more loans and more transactions. There’s a reason why we use Salesforce!”