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Brokers moving into asset finance could benefit from a new tool helping a several day process turn into just 15 minutes.
From the group behind broker document collection app Ezidox, Verimoto works with third party products to collect the relevant information when needing finance for a second hand car.
It aims to cut down the time it currently takes for a lender to send out an inspector to check the vehicle, as well as the details of the person selling the car, before they approve the loan.
Lakeba, the tech company which built Ezidox, has created Verimoto to guide the seller through stages of taking photos in a matter of minutes.
It is connected with third parties such as Equifax, to verify the seller’s identity with a photo of the drivers licence and a biometric video of their face.
Using Ezidox as a back-end, Verimoto will also collect documents like the seller’s bank statements, to ensure the bank sends the money to the correct place with no risk of fraud.
The entire process takes around 15 minutes and then the finished report is sent off to the lender.
One of the country’s biggest lenders has already been trialling the service with its internal team, although has chosen not to be named while the trial is underway.
Aggregator Connective is also rolling it out to its nearly 4000 strong broker network.
CEO of Ezidox, Geoff Kendall, said, “There’s a big move to adding strings to your bow so asset finance is going to be a big area for them.
“I think in the first case for anyone currently doing vehicle finance this will make their life easier. It makes it cheaper and more efficient so everybody wins there.
“In terms of brokers who haven’t done asset finance before, there’s a number of options for them to start expanding their business.
“The motivation behind the lender that we started work with was they believed the industry was ready for change, that the way it was working was slow and paper driven. What they wanted to do was get all the lenders on board. They think that the industry will improve as a result.
“I remember the first meeting with the bank, they said let’s look at our whole business and find problems we can resolve with technology. It’s a formal process we go through to drill down and find the problem.”
Lakeba sees itself as an “incubator” for innovative ideas in a number of different areas. But Kendall said that producing new technology is not about replacing people, it’s about making their lives more efficient.
He said, “We’re not a disruptor, we’re not trying to create an alternative, we’re trying to make it more efficient.
“We have created nine viable startups in a range of industries and it all starts with working with the industry to identify the problem. Then having the ability to commercialise and take it to market.”
CEO at Lakeba, Giuseppe Porcelli, said, “The way we conceive the idea is just workshopping with all our networks connections, customers, friends of the market. Primarily we speak with the leaders with specific ideas and in this case financial services.
“We were working with them to understand the second hand financing. They were spending too much money for the human research used for the collection of information about the car, the seller and the buyer and we offered them to engage us and build a solution to solve that problem.”
