Collaboration between Rural Finance, Sopra Banking Software and BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK delivers game-changing efficiencies to proposal process.

Providing ‘finance auto-acceptances while you work’ was the simple, specific efficiency gain that has been delivered successfully by Sopra Banking Software, leading partner of over 1,500 financial institutions across the world, for well-established broker partner, Rural Finance, in conjunction with BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK. 

The solution developed is an API interface between Sopra Financing Platform’s Sprint broker platform used by Rural Finance and the existing BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions’ technology, also designed by Sopra Banking Software. Marrying the two required a number of technical and organisation firsts; the result was precisely as specified. Today, not only can Rural Finance provide auto-approvals to their many customers in the rural communicty; they, their customers and BNP Paribas have benefitted from the removal of significant levels of re-work that was part of the previous financing proposal process. The result is greater efficiency between lender, broker and end-customer and as Rural Finance Director, Rex Tattersall reflects, more time to provide customers with a tailored, personal service.

Tattersall comments “As the largest specialist agricultural finance brokering network across the UK, our success relies upon personal service. We aim to be easy to work with, combining empathy with the distinctive requirements of our customers in the rural community, with speed and an understanding of their financial needs. Agriculture is a fast-moving industry, and the capacity to match our financing approach to this and at the same time make accessing finance quicker and easier is a positive outcome for everyone.”

The new API digitizes the entire finance proposal journey. Manual processes, often required due to the nature of agricultural financing, have been eradicated. The result is higher quality proposals with lower amount of input errors, improved turnaround time of decision and higher acceptance levels. It has been a winning scenario for all parties, buying time for everyone to focus on business development.

Tim Pulleyn, Head of Partner Sales at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions, states “We are delighted to have partnered with Sopra Banking Software and successfully delivered this solution for Rural Finance. This project is a great example of the importance we place on listening and responding to the business needs of our partners to help support them in achieving their commercial objectives – performance through partnership. The speed and efficiency delivered by the API interface benefits everyone in shortening the critical timeframe of proposal to credit decision and, crucially, enables our partner to provide an optimal service to the end customer. We look forward to rolling out the solution to our wider partner network.”

Hugh Mahony, Business Development Manager at Sopra Banking Software, notes “As a business, we have an established reputation for our agility in delivering targeted software solutions for the financial service community based on our configurable and composable cloud-based platforms. This new API is a case in point, delivering innovation for a specialist marketplace that is elegantly simple. It is the type of challenge in which we specialise, and it has been a pleasure to help Rural Finance and BNP Paribas once again.”