Pioneer in the field of real-time credit decisioning and risk control

This US-based pioneer in real-time credit decisioning had grown exponentially in its home market and was now trying to expand its geographic coverage internationally.

As trusted advisor to the Founder and the Legal Counsel, Fürst Advisory Services was awarded the mandate to drive international expansion, resulting in a European market entry and a profitable platform upon which business was further expanded in the years following the mandate.

A US-based pioneer in the field of real-time credit decisioning and risk control for lending and origination processes, this client offers its solutions in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. Over the years, the service offering had been built out to include market leading modules to cover an increasing part of the lending and origination efforts of its blue chip client base.

As a truly customer-focused organisation, our client has attained highest marks for technological advancement, bottom line impact and customer friendliness.

In evaluating how to successfully introduce its services and offerings to an international market, some key challenges were:

• Attaining a thorough understanding of the service offering in its US home market, including technological base, regulatory environment, customer relationships, value drivers.
• Reliably and swiftly scan the regulatory environment from a financial watch-dog and data protection perspective in all potential international markets.
• Estimating the market size for its services in all potential international markets and drafting a market entry strategy for the most promising ones.

Deploying domain experts surgically and combining them in project teams with internal experts from our client, Fürst Advisory Services executed a successful and profitable market entry in Europe by

• clearing all regulatory and legal questions up front and making contact with the leading incumbent players in UK, Germany, Switzerland to understand alternatives for positioning the client’s offering in Europe.
• With the financial services sector as the launch vertical, personal meetings were held with 250 banks in DACH in the space of 18 months to position the client in the reference set.
• Fürst Advisory Services acted as interim CEO for the European set-up of this client executing all necessary legal, tax, administrative tasks to get the client going.

Key results of this mandate were:

• Within two years after set-up, three blue chip clients had been on-boarded and the threshold to profitability reached.
• Client has been placed firmly in the reference set of the leading industry players.
• The foundation for further profitable growth in continental Europe had been laid.