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Evolution Credit: A Model for Success

Published • 12 August 2022

Software Development

Time to market matters. The faster a company deploys quality solutions, the more likely it will succeed.

In the case of credit companies, the faster they can accurately determine customer risk, the faster they can select and serve these customers

But how can a company outpace its competitors, reduce risk and exceed its customers’ expectations with a small team leading the way?

This was the challenge of Evolution Credit – a company that provides finance to individuals and customer-centric debt management solutions to businesses.

With four million customers and a balance sheet of over a billion rand, the company had its eye on acceleration.

The Challenge

Evolution has three lines of business:

Debt Collection: It purchases unsecured debts from vendors and as the owner of the debt, it crafts a value proposition for the consumer, sharing on a portion of the acquisition discount.
Evolution Life: Loans for customers to spend at over 600 hardware stores for renovations and building materials.
Evolution Life: It provides affinity insurance products including funeral cover, group life insurance and retrenchment cover.

Evolution Credit’s team wanted to accelerate its decision-making ability through predictive modelling – further improving its customer experience while reducing risks.

It also wanted to scale its analytics functions, access new technologies and automate repetitive tasks while giving its team time to innovate, create and monitor existing models.

Evolution Credit contacted Synthesis Software Technologies, a software development company known for using leading technologies to make businesses more competitive. Together they began the acceleration journey.

The Solution

The company was using analytics software on-premise. Together, Evolution Credit and Synthesis decided that migrating to AWS Cloud would allow Evolution Credit to scale its analytics and achieve its goals.

By migrating to the cloud, the company expanded its potential. Synthesis enabled and upskilled Evolution Credit through its Training Academy along the way so the team could experience all the benefits of cloud.

Evolution Credit and Synthesis started by creating a ‘safe landing zone’ in AWS to run an eight-week proof of concept (POC).

A landing zone is the fastest most secure way to set up a multi-account AWS environment. It includes infrastructure security, configuration management, inventory management, identity and access management, data encryption and intrusion prevention and detection.

“What we implemented was a basic ML OPS framework which allows us, through code, in an automated way, to create storage in AWS, upload data, pre-process the data, run all the modelling processes, create the model artifact, deploy it into the production environment, and then run a monitoring report on that model,” explains Sarel Myburgh at Evolution Credit.

“Our models will become much more sophisticated and much more accurate and that is a huge benefit for us.”

“Now our code sits in Bitbucket (a code repository) which is a feature I didn’t envisage us implementing at the start of the project, but it gives us the ability to have much more control over who does what. All changes are pushed for approval before they are deployed into production.” This increases security which is a non-negotiable for a credit company dealing with customer data.

“From a technology point of view, I was definitely surprised at Synthesis’ depth of knowledge. They were skilled, professional and got the job done. Synthesis went above and beyond in servicing our needs.”

The Results

The environment is still being customised but the future value it will add is clear. The modelling capabilities has allowed the company to prioritise which customers it engages with based on who it will be easiest to collect from. “I’d expect our cost to income ratio to reduce due to the implementation of the POC model,” says Myburgh.

But Evolution Credit was not only aiming to improve cost savings.

“The key measures of success are non-financial measures including getting our future models deployed faster to improve the time to market so we can do a lot more in a lot less time.”

Evolution Credit is now looking at the next steps now that it can better determine which clients to take on faster. It is looking to implement personalisation by using the preferred mediums to contact clients with the most applicable offers.

“Our expectation was quite high. We’ve definitely implemented a framework that can live up to it,” concludes Myburgh.