“Micro lender” Nimble says correlating system performance with customer journeys enables it to improve the customer experience as the company seeks to become a full-fledged digital bank and shed its label of payday loan.

The company enlisted New Relic, a provider of cloud-based service monitoring software, to help fill the holes in its conversion funnel by correlating them to system events.

Nimble says improving the customer journey is vital if he is to join a host of new Australian neobanks that market themselves on transparent digital experiences.

Founded in 2005 and now led by Gavin Slater, the former NAB IT chief and former head of the government’s Digital Transformation Agency, Nimble is trying to move from a small lender to a full-service digital bank.

The company has not yet obtained a banking license, which means that it cannot offer the larger financial products it wants and is limited to offering smaller loans, usually with interest rates and higher fees.

Jason Barry, Nimble’s chief digital and innovation officer, said the company has indeed pivoted since Slater’s arrival. In 2019, she started offering personal loans and auto loans.

And while Nimble remains a microlender and still offers payday loans, Barry says he does so “at the highest level of responsible lending.”

“We deal with financial needs a lot in the world, not financial needs,” Barry told Which-50.

“I mean you look at things like buy now pay later. It is certainly not as responsible as our own space. And it’s something we take very seriously, the way we treat our customers.

Barry says the payday loan label that Nimble is associated with is one of the driving forces behind the company’s move towards digital banking and “more contemporary lending products.”

A new new relic

Barry says Nimble brought in SaaS provider New Relic to better understand how their platform could impact customer conversion and retention rates for a new virtual credit card product.

Nimble is an “AWS first” company, relying on the US public cloud provider to scale up resources as needed. While the cloud approach means that Nimble can increase resources as expected, sometimes delays in doing so can cause delays for customers.

Essentially, the software allows Nimble to correlate events in the application funnel and the customer journey to system events, says Barry.

“If we see an impact on customers from a system perspective, it manifests in New Relic and allows us to track the performance of the funnel against the performance of the platform architecture. “

For example, Nimble needs to be able to approve customer transactions within fractions of a second, because if the entire transaction process takes longer than three seconds, it will be denied by the card network.

“We are using New Relic to make sure we are operating as needed to make sure customers are not affected. And if we notice any anomalies or spikes in processing times, it is immediately reported to us.

Nimble’s digital chief said integrating New Relic, a company founded in 2008, was relatively straightforward due to its well-established method of connecting platforms.

The challenge, however, was to clearly identify what Nimble ultimately wanted to achieve with the software, according to Barry.

“It’s very easy to put everything in New Relic and end up with this huge amount of data. But ultimately, it must be given meaning.

“So it pays to think a bit about what you’re trying to get out of all this data before you start sending it. “