Case Study of Circeo by IBM
October 2020
2 min readCirceo's Lending as a Service (LaaS) Offering Enables Banks to Approve and Fund Loans in Just a Few Minutes Thanks to IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers and Red Hat OpenShift Software.
Back in 2014, Circeo’s founders came together to develop a new kind of software company — one that would provide banks with a service: a fast, configurable, secure way to offer loans without paperwork or in-person visits. With Circeo’s lending as a service (LaaS) offering, banks would be able to approve and fund loans in just a few minutes — not the days, weeks or months required for traditional loans.
However, when Circeo was launched, SaaS was still fairly new. Many financial institutions were hesitant to try out the new technology and its delivery model. For Circeo to succeed, Matthieu M. Job, Chief Executive Officer, and his colleagues would need to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to security. They would need a solution that would scale quickly as the company grew. And they would need a company with a strong and trusted presence in the EU and beyond.
“We envisioned a product that was multicountry, multilingual, multicurrency, multimarket, multi-everything.”
Matthieu M. JobChief Executive Officer, Circeo
The combination of IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers and Red Hat OpenShift software positioned Circeo for success from the very beginning. At first, Circeo’s e-lending platform, TheLoanFactory, provided a few loans a day. Today, the company processes thousands of loan applications and accounts daily in seven European countries, and it is preparing to expand its services to the Asia Pacific region in the near future. Job expects daily totals to exceed 10,000 loans shortly thereafter.
However, 2020 brought about an unexpected new challenge: COVID-19. When the pandemic struck, several European governments mandated that banks reschedule loans to help citizens and businesses, that were struggling in the face of the global health crisis. Thanks to TheLoanFactory’s unique flexibility and configurability, Circeo’s partner banks were able to comply within a few hours. Banks without Circeo’s SaaS solution were still struggling to comply more than six months later.
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