continually evolving
B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W
RateSetter’s Jonathan Hodge, Andreas Papadopoulos and Alastair Jones explain why they believe their company must continuously evolve, to ensure its proposition is a growing success.
Written by Anna McMahon • Produced by Danielle Harris
2
3
AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR, RATESETTER WAS FIVE MONTHS INTO ITS ISA JOURNEY, HAVING RELEASED ITS ISA PRODUCT IN FEBRUARY 2018. SINCE THEN, A LOT OF HARD WORK HAS GONE INTO THE PROPOSITION, AS WELL AS THE TECHNOLOGY, ENSURING RATESETTER’S CUSTOMERS EXPERIENCE THE BEST POSSIBLE SERVICE.
C
hief Operating Officer, Jonathan Hodge, explained, “The product has been very successful for us. In the last 17 months, as well as releasing the product for new investors, we have also started taking transfers. People with existing ISAs with other providers, whether they are cash ISAs or stocks and shares ISAs, are now able to transfer those to RateSetter. We have been through
4
of ISA investor money, both new and transferred 5
RateSetter has an in-house team specialists working across its co hardware and security needs, an partnerS closely with the team a leverage additional software de capacity to enable it to deliver a range of business strategies rap our second ISA season and received £250 million of ISA investor money, both new and transferred. We believe we are the biggest provider of the innovative finance ISA in the country.” With success in marketing its ISA product to individual customers, RateSetter is now looking to attract financial advisers. Jonathan said, “One of our biggest areas of development at the moment in terms of technology is allowing easy access for advisers to our products. We are speaking with advisers to gather information about their requirements to 6
ensure our product works for them and their customers.” RateSetter has an in-house team of technology specialists working across its code, data, hardware and security needs, and it also partners closely with the team at N-iX to leverage additional software development capacity to enable it to deliver across a wide range of business strategies rapidly. For example, much work has been undertaken in the technology area to build a portal that can be accessed by advisers, which will enable them to manage the interests of their clients.
m of technology ode, data, nd it also at N-iX to evelopment across a wide pidly
Dedicated Development Team Sooware QA & Tessng
Sooware Product Development
Jonathan Hodge Chief Operating Officer
Technical Support
Mobile Applicaaon Development
Lviv, Kyiv (UA) | Sofia (BG) | Krakow (PL) | Minsk (BY) | Malmo (SE) | St. Petersburg (USA)
n-ix.com contact@n-ix.com 7
Alongside this, RateSetter is rapidly developing its mirco services architecture in order to help accelerate business growth. The nature of the micro service paradigm is to allow
distributed computing, something that the cloud providers are now supporting. It is a tool that allows code to be broken into different parts, each carrying out a specific function. Alastair Jones, Director of IT Operations, explained, “From a business point of view, it is an approach that allows us to break up the monolith code-base so that it becomes much more scalable. In this way, we can rapidly build and deploy architecture for accelerating customer growth and prepare for it accordingly.� RateSetter has earned a reputation for providing a
The biggest and most significant change in terms of security we have made is to use a product from Veracode Alastair Jones Director of IT Operations
8
platform that is both innovative and continuously moving forward, in a bid to offer customers the best possible service. Andreas Papadopoulos, Director of Engineering, said, “We are about to launch a new scoring system to determine the creditworthiness of customers. It gives us the ability to derive credit scores from different data sources to inform credit strategies. It is based on the micro-services architecture and is completely bespoke to us, giving our credit team the ability to easily customise strategies”.
Operating since 2010
600,000 investors and borrowers
Jonathan said, “RateSetter is committed to building its own credit decisioning technology. At the very basic level, when we have new customers who want to borrow from our platform, we have to make a decision about whether or not they should receive a loan. We have built our own technology - it is a big project, which is currently going through its second phase. It is part of RateSetter’s proposition, and who we are, which is, we believe, the best peer-to-peer lending potential new threats. Alastair company for managing risk.” said, “The biggest and most significant change in terms of Cyber security is something that security we have made is to the company takes very seriously, use a product from Veracode. constantly updating its security This tool allows us to test the practices to withstand any code as it is written to check for
£3.2Bn
£3.2 billion invested to date
9
We are about to launch a new scoring system to determine the creditworthiness of customers Andreas Papadopoulos, Director of Engineering 10
vulnerabilities, so every time a new code is built, it is analysed by Veracode and we receive reports back. There is an iterative loop to ensure the developers are writing secure code, free of application security flaws, and they know at which points it could fall down.” One of the other pieces of infrastructure in place is cloud security platform, Cisco Umbrella. Alastair added, “Cisco Umbrella manages calls made to sites that are outside of our control, where there is known to be a threat. It protects all Domain Name Server (DNS) traffic, preventing user connections from being completed when the user attempts to browse to sites which are known to be malicious or compromised in some way. We use many pieces of infrastructure such as this to protect as many elements as we can. The next stage will be looking at how documents are managed and owned, and what compliance can be put around the ownership of individual files. We have come a considerable way in the last two years. It is our aim to stay one step ahead and remain as secure as possible.”
clear proposition and we are well placed for the future. We have a strong product that appeals to a large number of people who would like to do more with their money. We pride ourselves on making the product as accessible as possible, allowing our customers to access their accounts and their money as simply as possible. If their circumstances change, they are able to put money in or take money out. In addition, we are looking at how new types of customer can have access to the product we are offering. Underneath that, we are doing a lot of work across all our technology, from developing our platform to looking at the risk of cyber security. The platform is constantly improving and becoming more and more scalable in order to meet future demand.”
As for the future of RateSetter, the company is continually evolving. Jonathan added, “We have a very
For further information on RateSetter, visit www.ratesetter.com 11
6th Floor, 55 Bishopsgate London EC2N 3AS 020 3142 6226 contactus@ratesetter.com www.ratesetter.com