Bizcap moves at speed and scale to fund small businesses

Bizcap is an Australian Business lender that prides itself on supporting businesses that need it the most, including those with low credit scores who are typically turned down by other lenders. Bizcap’s extensive underwriting experience and smart use of technology help the business to carefully manage risk and ensure lending is sustainable for itself and its customers.

The founders of Bizcap, Zalman Blachman and Abraham White, worked in this area of finance in the US and realised a gap in the Australian market where SMEs struggled to access capital with speed, ease, and open-mindedness to their situation.

“We believe that Australian small businesses should have fast access to the capital they need to grow, even if they don’t have the ‘perfect credit score’ or fit the mould,” said Zalman Blachman. “We’re able to lend to these businesses by taking a more systematic approach to assessing credit and risk and looking at more than just their credit history.”

Salesforce helps Bizcap manage its lending process at scale and speed. It also supports the rapid growth of the business’ broker network.

Bizcap launched in June 2019 and within months it found its manual processes pushed to the limits. It needed to streamline the end-to-end lending process and wanted a CRM to help move customers through the pipeline.

Rebecca del Rio, Head of Marketing and Development, was thankful that Bizcap had chosen Salesforce. She had used it in a previous role and knew that, with some customisation, it would help Bizcap to automate and scale. “We have ambitious goals and know it would not be possible to get where we want to go without the right technology stack; Salesforce has been a key platform to support our growth.”

Bizcap started with just Sales Cloud. From there, they have added multiple apps via the App Exchange such as FormStack and Docusign. They also built their own API along with a partner portal to allow brokers and aggregators to plug directly into their systems and increase their deal flow tremendously.

The entire lending process with Bizcap can be done within just three hours. According to Bizcap, this is faster than any other Australian non-bank lender, ultimately helping small businesses access funds more quickly. As loans are paid back, Bizcap utilises data pushed from their loan platform into Pardot to engage with customers.

With the lending process streamlined, and with the addition of their Head of Partnerships, Kama Atcheson, Bizcap turned its focus to scaling its broker network. Until late last year, there was a small group of brokers who submitted leads to Bizcap through a Google form connected to Salesforce. Bizcap would follow up on leads and provide brokers with weekly updates on progress.

Preparing these updates took more than 30 hours each week and involved extracting data, manipulating it from Salesforce, and manually adding information like commissions. For Bizcap to bring on more brokers, it needed to reduce the time and effort involved in reporting. It also needed to simplify the onboarding experience.

Bizcap looked at how others managed their broker network and decided a dedicated partner portal was the way forward. As a bootstrapped business, Bizcap wanted to avoid an expensive custom portal. It sought a solution that could be implemented quickly and deliver a fast return on investment.

Experience Cloud was the ideal platform as it offered many of the capabilities Bizcap needed ‘out of the box’ and allowed Bizcap to connect its partner portal directly to its data in Salesforce. They enlisted two separate consultants to build it, one for the front-end and one for the back-end.

When new brokers join Bizcap, they sign an agreement and get set up with access to the partner portal. They can start submitting leads right away and upload information like bank statements to help with assessments.

Additionally, brokers no longer need to wait for weekly reports to see how deals are tracking. Instead, they can log in to the portal at any time to view current deals and stats like monthly conversion rates.

Bizcap estimates the productivity savings created by the portal are equivalent to two full-time employees. This includes time saved on onboarding and reporting.

“The portal has been a game-changer for us and helped us to scale up our broker network by over 300% in just three months,” said del Rio. “We’re also able to offer them an experience that we’re incredibly proud of and it is having such a positive impact on revenue and the experience we provide our brokers. Seeing the success of our BETA version, we can’t wait to see the impact the planned features will have on our brokers.”

Even during the pandemic, Bizcap experienced double-digit month-on-month growth and it had its biggest month ever in October 2020. The business was also able to be a lifeline to customers throughout COVID-19 when many SME lenders closed off their funding.

“Salesforce has allowed us to thrive, not just survive through what has been a tumultuous year for many. The platform has been instrumental in allowing us to support SMEs with their cash flow problems and ultimately, support their growth,” del Rio.