Through enrichment solutions, Belvo helps business digital bank BS2 offer credit with less risk and better tailor their products to serve SME companies in Brazil.
Table of Contents
- Challenges for small businesses to access credit
- Why open finance is key for B2B players
- Why Belvo
- Other enrichment possibilities for digital banks
Having access to data is no longer enough: to stand out in the financial innovation ecosystem, credit providers must seek enrichment solutions to make the most out of the information made available by consumers.
With that in mind, BS2, a Brazilian digital bank focused on enterprises, has partnered with Belvo to enhance its digital credit offers for small and medium businesses (SMEs).
Now, with the help of advanced analytics models, raw historical transactional information from companies is categorized by Belvo’s technology, and BS2 receives uniform and enriched sets of data that are ready to be used.
The bank then uses this information to improve and optimize their credit offers with custom products, which are key for gathering SME customers.
Challenges for small businesses to access credit
“Today, SMEs have few product offerings and unappealing conditions because of the risk that is associated with the lack of financial history information and credit”, says Fernando Radunz, CIO of BS2, in an interview for Canal Tech.
According to data by FGV from 2021, there is currently a R$ 166 billion gap in credit for small and medium companies in Brazil, so being able to offer quick and precise lines to these businesses is a key strategy for BS2. The study estimates there are 17,3 million small companies with a potential demand of R$514 billion in credit yearly.
The bank currently offers a comprehensive digital platform with integrated solutions for clients that go from credit and banking to international payments and insurance.
Why open finance is key for B2B players
Open finance APIs are game-changers for B2B players when it comes to offering credit. By connecting to their customer’s data with Belvo, business banks can see all the accounts they need in a single platform and understand their client’s needs better.
This allows banks to complement their traditional scoring models with new insights based on transactional data extracted in real-time. Thanks to this, they can analyze their customers’ spending patterns and economic activity faster and better understand how their financial stability will evolve. As a consequence, banks like B2S can improve the precision of their credit scoring models, lower operational costs and prices for customers, and increase the likelihood of loans being approved.
In the case of digital-first banks, having an open finance partner taking care of structure and integration also means saving time while building their products, as well as providing a better experience for clients at the moment of connection.
Why Belvo
Belvo’s enrichment solution is being used at first to review declined credit propositions and new requests, and also assists in expanding offers for current customers. With this effort, BS2 expects to also increase loan deals for companies that generate revenue above R$1 million, and get closer to its goal of becoming the main digital bank for enterprises in Brazil.
“This partnership brings intelligence and clarity to the data, and provides us with more information during risk analysis. For the bank, this means more assertive, secure decisions, and for the customers, it is an extra opportunity to access credit lines based on their financial history”.
Fernando Radunz, CIO of BS2
“We are glad to help BS2 improve their offers through open finance. We know that access to enriched data is crucial to boost credit analysis and increase client usage of new services. Our mission is to build a financial system that is more open, inclusive, and secure, and this partnership reinforces that we are on the right path,” explained Albert Morales, General Manager for Belvo in Brazil.
Other enrichment possibilities for digital banks
“As more companies adopt open APIs to connect to financial data, the need for more enrichment products to empower companies to extract even more out-of-the-box value from financial data increases as well,” says Óscar Castañeda, Enrichment Product Manager at Belvo.
Belvo’s solutions for these players include, for example, data categorization: the delivery of organized financial transactions in defined categories — making it easy to predict revenue flow, and identify current payments and debt.
One of the main advantages of counting on an open finance partner for this service is that API platforms already have intelligence gathered from analyzing millions of users’ transactions from dozens of different companies, a feature that helps improve their categorization models every day.
Through data science applied to our API technology, Belvo is helping B2B banks and lenders in Latin America offer the products their customers really need. If you want to know more about how your business can benefit from data science, get in touch with us.
