BestAdvice fires the questions at Alexis Rog, founder and CEO at Sikoia.
BestAdvice (BA): Tell us about Sikoia and your role in the company?
Alexis Rog (AR): I am the founder and CEO of Sikoia, a B2B fintech that helps lenders and brokers automate their customer verification processes. We serve clients ranging from fast-growing fintech startups to large financial institutions. We are also FCA-regulated as an open banking and credit reference provider.
Before setting up Sikoia, I used to be a tech investor so I have witnessed the explosion in fintech solutions over the years that have helped to address specific challenges like identity verification, open banking and anti-money laundering, to name a few.
However, while these have clearly been beneficial to the financial services industry, they have also created fragmentation, data silos and the ongoing need for cross-validation between different sources. Many parts of these processes are still managed manually today or patched together through custom built in-house systems.
This is why I set up Sikoia in 2021. I saw a chance to create a new type of technology company that could unify customer data from different sources and help tackle process inefficiencies that I felt had not yet been effectively addressed in the financial services industry.
BA: How does Sikoia’s customer verification platform differ from other technology in the market?
AR: Our Customer Verification Platform centralises structured and unstructured data from different sources using proprietary models and latest technology, standardises them to enable more consistent decision-making and automatically generate valuable insights. Customer data is the foundation of our platform, enabling us to tackle diverse financial services use cases and achieve increasingly unparalleled levels of efficiency.
For example, a consumer applying for a mortgage or a small business seeking a loan will usually encounter swift initial onboarding with decisions in principle often based on credit bureau data.
However, as the application progresses, the process becomes bogged down by the need to manually verify, request and cross-check data from multiple sources – like open banking, payslips, and identity documents. This leads to delays, inconsistent decisions, and regulatory risks, especially with new regulations like Consumer Duty.
To combat this, Sikoia has developed an AI-powered tool that automatically processes mortgage application documents, such as payslips, bank statements and tax returns. Customers receive instant updates as soon as they submit their documents, without the need for a manual review.
This can save customers time on tasks like filling out budget planners, while automated checks verify income, employer details, and affordability behind the scenes, saving time for the lender.
BA: The role of AI is a fairly new concept for many people. What benefits can it bring to the mortgage market?
AR: AI has the potential to not only bring significant time savings to the mortgage process, but also a fundamentally better customer experience. The best part is that it can be implemented in a way that requires minimal changes to current processes and behaviours.
The mortgage market is particularly interesting as much of the process is still manual today. Many improvements can be made in areas such as enhancing connectivity between brokers and lenders, eliminating double keying, and standardising customer data across the mortgage process.
Ultimately, I believe the key to unlocking efficiencies is offering customers a range of options to share their data that accommodate different preferences, but lead to the same unified outcome.
Sikoia’s AI-powered tool automatically processes mortgage application documents, such as payslips, bank statements and tax returns and automatically generates all the verification checks as well as overall application completeness checks.
This removes the need for manual review queues and cuts hours of work, freeing up time to better support more customers and more complex cases. The benefits for customers, brokers and lenders alike are substantial.
A few years ago, such technology would have been costly and unreliable, but AI now fills that gap efficiently and affordably.
BA: What role do you see AI playing in the mortgage market over the next five to 10 years?
AR: There is no doubt that AI is set to become a major part of our lives, whether we’re prepared for it or not. Unlike past technological waves, AI will be able to handle complex cognitive tasks and is advancing at a pace that’s hard to grasp.
The implications of this are significant and the benefits of which will make handling many mortgage cases more efficiently and more cost-effectively. At the same time, automating the processing of more customer data should enable lenders to develop tailored products, pricing risk with greater accuracy.
This can also create new market dynamics: increased efficiency will also lead to more applications from brokers to lenders, but without necessary a rise in mortgages granted. This could lower conversion rates, raise processing costs for lenders and drive more competition.
The market will relatively quickly divide into two tiers: those who adopt AI and those who don’t. Adopters will benefit from the ability to handle more cases at a higher margin and, most importantly, from delivering a fundamentally better customer experience with faster turnaround times and greater certainty early in the process.
