“Our solutions are turnkey, from implementation to training to ongoing performance reviews, and we provide our clients with a full team: client service managers, implementation engineers, customer service, data scientists and compliance experts.”
Community and regional financial institutions often believe they do not have the budget, experience or staff necessary to implement innovative solutions—even by partnering with a fintech provider—so they often shy away from trying new technology. In addition, the world of regulatory compliance often changes, creating doubt about the risk vs. reward potential of new solutions from a compliance standpoint. For that reason, Florida-based Velocity Solutions takes a consultative approach in working with prospective clients. They don’t start by immediately pitching features and benefits. Rather, they spend time learning about the financial institution’s unique challenges and then assess holistically where they have the biggest opportunities. “Our solutions are turnkey, from implementation to training to ongoing performance reviews, and we provide our clients with a full team: client service managers, implementation engineers, customer service, data scientists and compliance experts,” said Christopher Leonard, CEO, Velocity Solutions.
Velocity Solutions started by helping financial institutions acquire more checking accounts. Velocity learned that current systems for reporting checking account openings were cumbersome, and it could take a week or two just to get a report from the IT department about how many accounts were opened at each branch in the prior week.
“This made us build a data-driven approach to acquiring new accounts (our Invitation Checking® System) and onboarding those accounts (our Account Revenue Solution™) using proven incentive strategies from our healthcare business that caused millions of Americans to start exercising,” said Leonard. “We also built Intelligent Limit System®, which sets overdraft limits at the account level based on the ability to repay.” Finally, over recent years they saw a need to offer turnkey digital lending platforms in two areas that were significantly underserved by banks and credit unions: small business loans and small-dollar, short-term credit for consumers.
Velocity Solutions uses a unique approach of pairing their data and analytics platform (which imports numerous data points from client financial institutions on a daily basis) with proven strategies to drive more deposits and accounts, increase activity and onboarding of accounts, intelligently set limits for short-term risks (such as overdraft limits and small-dollar loans), increase loan application rates and efficiency, and give bankers access to analytics and dashboards which give them relevant views into their account base. This is all powered by the Velocity Intelligent Platform®, a centralized platform that allows Velocity’s solutions to operate in an integrated synchronous environment, bolstering the individual performance of each solution. Savvy bank and credit union executives understand the value of centralizing their data on a unified platform. With all lines of business strategically working off the same data, they can easily identify cross-selling opportunities and track onboarding to facilitate the account holder’s journey.
Velocity Solutions transformed a regional bank that had only an “informal” overdraft program in place and didn’t offer overdraft services at all on the debit card channel. So, when their customers experienced debit declines, the bank was taking a double hit. “Their customers may not have understood why their cards were declined, creating a poor service experience, and the bank was losing potential overdraft and interchange revenue,” said Leonard. “We implemented our overdraft management program, Intelligent Limit System®, along with our Reg. E Outreach Solution™ that included proactive calls to customers from our professional team, training of bank staff, and help with associated compliance questions.”
A major priority for Velocity Solutions today is continuing the development of their digital lending platforms due to strong demand from consumers and businesses, particularly on the heels of the COVID-19 crisis. “While our Akouba solution originally was designed for small business loans, our roadmap is to develop this intuitive and easy-to-use platform to expand it to larger consumer loans and enhance functionality on the business side to allow it to be used for larger loan amounts,” said Leonard.”
