Payliance Is Elevating the Loan Management Process for Underbanked Consumers

Imagine it’s ten o’clock on a Thursday night. A loan payment is due and you’ve just learned that won’t have the funds to pay the full amount on time. You call your lender—hoping to either make a smaller payment or delay it—but instead of speaking with someone to discuss the situation, you hear a recorded message: “Our business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM. Please call back during standard business hours.”

This scenario is all too common among underbanked consumers who, perhaps due to a lower credit score, find it difficult to procure loans from traditional financial institutions. Instead, they turn to third-party lenders. But many of these third-party lenders are small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that don’t have the resources to build a solution, such as a consumer-facing app that allows you to self-service your loan payments. Instead, they rely on phone-based or in-person services.

Technology challenges for SMB lenders

“If you’re a large, corporate, publicly-traded company that deals in online lending, you’re going to have a team of people that are building and maintaining apps,” says James Robinson, Product Director of Payliance, a B2B payment processing company. “But there is that mid to smaller tier where it just doesn’t make sense for them to take that on.” Luckily, the team behind Payliance saw these pain points and decided to build a solution. If you can manage the rest of your life from your smartphone, they thought, consumers should be able to manage something as important as their loan payments from their phone, as well.

Founded in 2007, Payliance offers a full suite of solutions for merchants, including payment processing, verification, and recovery. Now, their new mobile app (built with Amazon Web Services technology) makes the payment process more seamless for consumers, as well. Users are able to log into an app and self-service their loan payments, managing the amount and timing of their payments 24/7, 365 days a year—as opposed to only during business hours.

Focusing on the customer’s needs

Payliance’s ultimate goal is, and always has been, convenience. “You’re probably not changing your payment date because you want to,” says Robinson. “You’re probably in a spot where something happened and you need accommodations.” Payliance offers a consumer-facing tool that can help borrowers in their hour of need, streamlining the payment process so they can focus on managing the other, more important parts of the situation.

Intrinsic to the creation of this app was one of Amazon’s core methodologies: the Working Backwards process, which the Payliance team was introduced to in 2021. This methodology involves:

• Listening to customers
• Defining the problem
• Ideating
• Testing
• Refining
• Launching a solution

Instead of focusing on how to price their product, go to market, and position it—which are all important considerations for later in the game—the team focused on the more immediate question of who they were actually creating value for. “One thing, and this is fundamental to Working Backwards, is really focusing on the end state in mind versus trying to come up with requirements and then elaborate on them,” says Robinson. “At the end of the day, you get something that may or may not be what you envisioned in the beginning steps.”

The benefits of building your app on AWS

After successfully creating the mobile app, the decision to continue working with AWS was easy. “We didn’t have to go through due diligence. ‘Is this company going to go out of business next week? Is this solution stable? Can it scale?’” says Robinson. “Those were already answered for us just by choosing AWS. That’s one example of why building on the AWS platform really made sense.”

The Payliance team also liked the flexibility that AWS afforded, specifically the prospect of pay-as-you-go services and technology. This was key because the team knew their technology was not going to be running around the clock. “There was an effort to make this serverless and make it stateless, to drive better cost efficiency and basically only bring up the resources when they’re needed,” says Robinson. “So that was one of the driving factors in the development process.”

Looking forward, the Payliance team hopes to continue to add ease and flexibility to the heavily regulated financial services industry. They plan to continue improving their mobile app and are currently working on developing a web app for those who would prefer to manage their loans from a desktop computer.

Conclusion and next steps

Payliance believes their platform will continue to grow because it is beneficial for both merchants and consumers. “Merchants are not just looking to lend consumers money so they can make money,” says Robinson. “Something we focused on, in this effort and others, is creating solutions that ultimately benefit the consumer. Because, again, it benefits everybody in the ecosystem.”

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