• Jerry Young, CEO at ieDigital


• 23.03.2022 08:35 am

1. Please tell us a little about ieDigital' s history.

ieDigital, originally named Intelligent Environments, was founded 37 years ago.  

After delivering the first UK internet banking credit card solutions for Marbles™, it re-branded as IE and became a specialist software company dedicated to serving the financial services sector. It was listed on the AIM stock market until 2012, switched back to Intelligent Environments as the brand for a while, and then rebranded as ieDigital in 2018. 

Today, ieDigital is part of the Parabellum Investments’ portfolio. Parabellum Investments is led by its founder and CEO, Rami Cassis. 

2. What does the company do? What is your geographic footprint? What recent developments would you highlight?

By putting banking customer needs front and centre, ieDigital builds cutting-edge financial service solutions that encourage engagement, nurture trust, and help banks develop longer-lasting relationships. 

We work mainly with UK-based clients but have built solutions for clients across Europe and in Australia. 

Our Interact Application Suite is the innovative solution that enables our clients to improve their customer services functionality. It includes Interact Acquire, designed to help customers open an account in minutes. With a host of features from data verification services integration and credit search workflow decisioning, Interact Acquire makes the complex process of acquiring customers straightforward. 

Interact Connect allows users to self-serve across a full range of financial services products. Connect offers a more personalised experience to customers, enabling them to enjoy a secure, intuitive, and easy to use experience.

The Interact Application Suite also includes Interact Collect, an engaging and compliant self-cure digital collections portal. Working with existing collection strategy engines, Interact Collect enables customers to repay their arrears with a non-confrontational, accessible, and compliant user experience.

An important development is the recent launch of Interact Switch, a digital solution designed to help mortgage lenders retain customers at product offer maturity. It effectively replaces manual legacy processes, helping to avoid the build-up of notifications in the lead-up to customer mortgage product renewal. Mortgage lenders can operate more efficiently by decreasing paper-based costs, mortgage representative costs, and third-party costs. As a result, providers can deliver better customer experiences around communication, security, offer and application status, and progress reports. Interact Switch also enables mortgage lenders to improve their own ESG offering. The modular and flexible digital platform allows lenders to introduce exciting new functionality while removing the traditional labour-intensive processes which result in higher costs and a high carbon footprint.

3. Looking back over the last two years, what have been the key drivers of your growth?

Even during a global pandemic, which has of course dominated the last two years, the UK’s ever-evolving digital banking sector refuses to stand still. Indeed, if anything, Covid has accentuated the need to implement digital customer-first solutions. 

The pace of digital transformation has never been so important or fast moving as we see today. According to a study by Salesforce, some 68 per cent of customers say that Covid has elevated expectations of their bank’s digital capabilities. Similarly, an Accenture study of more than 47,000 consumers reveals that more of us are being driven towards digital services because of the pandemic. 

We have witnessed this change first-hand, with clients from right across the financial services sector demanding new, customer-centric digital channels, be they interactive mobile apps to sophisticated, interactive, multi-channel functionality. Customers are demanding ever more from their financial services providers, who are, in turn, coming to us to design the cutting-edge products they need to keep their customers satisfied. 

4. Can you please give us some specific examples of how your solutions have really had a positive impact on your clients?

The common denominator when it comes to the positive impact we deliver can be characterised by the creation of flexible, cutting-edge self-serve solutions that enable customers to manage their finance channels confidently and securely without too much labour-intensive, manual intervention.

Specific examples of this can be illustrated by our partnership with Leicester-based Cambridge and Counties Bank whereby we launched a brand-new, cutting-edge financial anti-money laundering technology solution to analyse, score and keep track of their new and existing customers’ banking activity. The new solution was delivered against the concerning backdrop reported in PwC’s Global Economic Crime Survey 2020 which reveals economic crime reached its highest level in the previous 24 months with 56% of UK businesses surveyed stating that they were impacted by fraud, corruption or other economic crime. This 2020 figure was the highest in the history of PwC’s Global Economic Crime Survey and is well above the global finding of 47%.

We have also worked with DF Capital, a specialist savings and commercial lending bank, to develop a digital interactive channel allowing its savings customers to self-serve their accounts, and apply for new products, fully online. With a need to grow the funding of their B2B lending services, a strong, engaging customer self-service portal has been essential to attract and keep new customers, without the need to grow their contact centre and manual processes.

5. What are the main trends that will determine how your company develops over the coming two years or so?

We are always innovating to ensure we can hit the ground running when it comes to the delivery of the latest customer-focused technology.

We look forward to combining the latest technology with the most up-to-date trends to ensure we continue providing the services that our clients demand. These include enhancing our advancement in creating smarter customer experiences using Artificial Intelligence to create more personalised journeys and creating deeper experiences with customer data drawn from multiple sources through the wider use of Open Banking. 

Financial institutions are also looking to consolidate their supplier base to lessen the impact and overhead of managing differing point-based solutions – this is a key trend that we will be following over the next two years. 

6. What does the competitive landscape look like from your point of view? How would you summarise all this in one or two sentences?

Digital software solutions for the UK financial services sector remains a highly competitive field, and with the number of digital-only banks entering the landscape, and with more of the “traditional” banks and building societies investing in their digital offering, it will become even more competitive. 

However, the companies with the most creative, technical, and business-lead staff, capable of innovating to the best possible standards for the benefit of their clients, will remain successful as the financial services sector moves to an even more digital-centric approach.