Sometimes It’s the Simple Things

Sometimes It’s the Simple Things

By Matt Morris, Singlify Product Manager

As Product Manager of a technology company I always support the team in pushing technology boundaries in order to deliver more powerful features for our customers. We love the challenge and get excited about some of the cool things we can do.

But sometimes the “cool” features aren’t the ones that our customers get excited about.

Recently one of our CDFI customers was kind enough to host a call with another CDFI that was considering adopting Singlify. The call went really well and the attendees shared so many common challenges. The call got onto the topic of how to get access to all the information required to make a really quick accept/reject loan decision. Our customer talked about the huge value they were seeing from the integration we provide to Open Banking data that allows them to easily access all the information they need to do a preliminary assessment of a loan application.

They commented that this integration was saving them hours on every loan application that they processed.

So what is the point here? Well from a technology point of view that integration is not exciting. It’s pretty simple. It uses a third party tool and in truth, generating the required insights probably only took us a few days to develop. So it was way down our “cool list” but right up at the top of the customer’s.

I think this is indicative of how we must continually step back  and re-evaluate how we prioritise new features. As we develop our product to support UK credit unions we are working with a group of regional credit unions to prioritise product features, understand integration requirements and create a great user experience. We want them to help us identify some of the “simple” things that can deliver quick wins so that we focus on their “cool list” and not ours.