How Instabank Is Using Technology to Meet Clients – Wherever They Are

While many businesses have goals, few are moving towards them as successfully as Instabank. In its two years of operation, it has already issued loans totaling over $370 million in Norway and expanded into Finland. Like many other challenger banks, Instabank offers lending products through its website, but the bank has taken their goal of accessible lending one step further with the development of in-store payment solutions.

Their digital-forward approach to lending takes into account that not all purchases are planned and traditional payment methods, such as cash, debit, or credit, are not always the best option for customers.

So, what does this mean for the consumer who’s fallen in love with the couch in the shop window, but wasn’t expecting to make a large purchase?

Instabank provides a simple lending solution that’s available at the point of sale to provide shop customers with instant loan approval. To power the growth of this payment solution Instabank has partnered with a number of key businesses including Eplehuset (a leading retailer for Apple products in Norway) and Power (leading electronics chain across the Nordics), and in-store lending now accounts for a major portion of Instabank’s loan approvals.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why instant loans have yet to become widely accessible, but managing risk and creating the tech solutions needed to provide instant access have played significant roles in the delay. However, these problems didn’t stop Instabank from creating a banking solution that is easy to use, is accessible where and when it’s needed, and enables the smooth flow of payments and services between consumers and businesses.

Building a Digital Bank? – Only with the right talent

So, how do you build a challenger bank that is both ready to handle the complicated risk analytics that has traditionally slowed banks down, while creating banking products that are instantly accessible to consumers?

You hire innovative people to drive the business ahead, such as Instabank’s forward-thinking CTO Farzad Jalily. Farzad and his team are responsible for creating the technology solutions that not only provide a streamlined consumer experience, but are also scalable and adaptable. When asked about creating the architecture that can support Instabank’s business now and grow with them in the future Farzad said,

“I’ve been an architect and an enterprise architect, and you build up a dream architecture. I had all these wishes based on past mistakes and successes. At Instabank, I could live out my dream, I could draw out the architecture and cherry-pick solutions and put them together using APIs.”

As a challenger bank, Instabank isn’t weighed down by the legacy systems that often prohibit big banks from innovating and Farzad sees his distributed architecture as a huge advantage over competitors, “All the banks small or big, have problems with their legacy solutions, which we don’t have. We use a micro integration platform Instead of having a heavy, established API that you have to use a lot of money to build, so time to market and costs are really low because we use this kind of technology.” Farzad’s idea of using third-party services, which is a unique solution to banking technology needs, can be easily scaled to meet the changing needs of the business as it expands.

Developing a lending solution that greets you at the checkout

Like all other parts of the business, developing lending apps for in-store partner solutions is a fast and easily scalable process for the Instabank team. Their focus is on providing an easy and discrete application experience for customers. To do this they create simple solutions that use Provenir’s sophisticated analytics solution to manage the loan application processes.

Instabank’s partnership with a large furniture retailer in Norway is a great example of this. Instabank has replaced their existing payment solution to create a seamless financing option that can be completed at the point of purchase. Traditional financing options used to pay for large purchases are far from consumer friendly. In many shops, you fall in love with a couch or other big-ticket item that catches your eye, and then fill out pages and pages of paperwork to secure credit. This isn’t just a slow process, it’s cumbersome, archaic, and enough to put many customers off making a purchase.

Have you ever wished that applying for a small loan was as simple as sending a text message to your bank?

Instabank has created that option for the store’s customers.

Read more about Instabank’s innovative consumer loan product here.