Aptaria helped a financial services company increase profits by moving its cash advance processing from a partner’s platform to a customized PaaS solution.

Problem: Revenue Going to Competition

SwiftCapital provides small, short-term cash advances to restaurants and other retailers. Since 2006, they’ve given advances to over 10,000 small businesses, many of whom would have been turned away by banks due to the recent credit freeze.

Until recently, however, Swift lacked a platform for processing these cash advances. This led them to partner with a competitor and use its processing system, creating several problems:

Lost revenue, as Swift had to give a cut of each deal to its competitor
Limited control of the system, preventing Swift from automatically integrating with Experian and other credit rating agencies
Poor visibility into the deals pipeline and limited reporting making it difficult to manage the business

Action: PaaS Processing Solution on Force.com

Aptaria designed and built Swift a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) system for processing cash advances, using Force.com. Called SwiftForce, this system:

Administers the full lifecycle of a cash advance: sales, quality control, underwriting, risk management, and funding
Manages workflow tightly, allowing only the appropriate staff to view/update an advance at any given stage
Integrates lead records so Swift can easily run and track email and direct mail campaigns
Processes daily payment transactions and calculates balances automatically, providing management with clear visibility into business performance
Measures the risk of advances automatically and alerts management when one exceeds an acceptable threshold
Charts trends showing the health of the sales pipeline over time

Result: Greater Independence, Higher Profits

Aptaria’s PaaS solution has delivered a number of key benefits to SwiftCapital’s business, including:

Increased profits as it no longer has to share revenue with its competitor
Stronger competitive position resulting from independence from partner’s platform
More leads and higher lead-to-sale conversion rate resulting from more frequent, more efficient marketing campaigns
More advances funded – with no additional staff – resulting from time saved by integrating with credit bureaus
Fewer defaults as management can quickly spot high-risk cash advances
No hardware to buy, no software to maintain, no infrastructure to manage, no computer geeks on staff