South Africa is one of Africa's strongest emerging economies. Their online credit market has seen incremental yearly growth in tandem. This growth has come with many challenges, most importantly the various channels of increased risk that consumers accessing this credit are now exposed to.
South Africa's digital lender Wonga has matured into a dominant position in the credit market by successfully addressing many of these risks and developing a commitment to transparent and sustainable lending under strict regulatory conditions that further protects consumers.
Part of the reason for Wonga's success has been its focus on generating positive outcomes for its customers. As a responsible lender, it provides clear and transparent information about its loans, including the total costs. It's also very flexible in its terms, allowing customers to borrow anything from 500 to 8000 South African Rand (ZAR) over repayment periods that stretch from four days to as long as six months in bite-size installment repayments.
While the product offering is in-sync with customer demands, Wonga does face challenges when it comes to its customer engagement and communicating its products to its customers, particularly with sharing data between its marketing and delivery systems. This led to a recent change in its customer engagement partner.
Frictionless customer engagement
To get the level of engagement it needed across its channels, Wonga chose a Dynamics 365 CRM project. According to Wonga's Chief Technology Officer Michael Lazarus, it was a straightforward solution with quick adoption that represented a natural fit.
In terms of the benefits of the new solution, the ease of cross-business integration is key, as is its usability. One of the biggest successes has been Wonga's ability to track the direct impact of its email marketing campaigns on the number of loan applicants, something it was not able to do previously. Wonga is also able to identify when emails are not read so it can remarket to those customers via SMS.
What are the results?
This new functionality is already generating results for the lender, and bounce rates that are easy to interpret are helping the team to launch new marketing campaigns to target specific customers. The result has been improved yields and growing revenues.
According to Lazarus: "Our business is based on targeting customers when they need us, in a very efficient way. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in top-of-funnel demand, and we will continue to improve on it over the next months."
