Posted by Samir Desai, CEO, Funding Circle

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today we hear from Samir Desai Co-founder and CEO of Funding Circle, the world’s leading marketplace for small business loans.

At Funding Circle, we’ve built the world’s leading marketplace for individuals to lend money directly to small and medium-sized businesses in the US and the UK. Since our launch in 2010, we've experienced rapid growth, lending more than half a billion dollars to over 5,500 businesses. Google Apps for Work equips our teams to work across geographies which keeps business strategy on track as the company grows. Today, I’ll share four insights that are relevant for other businesses looking for growth opportunities.

1. Use data to your advantage
We use a combination of data and risk analytics to effectively grade our loans in more detail than traditional lending institutions and to differentiate ourselves from what other banks offer. Because of our deep analytical understanding, we can offer loans to businesses that banks might turn away. We also publish the performance of every loan we’ve ever originated on our marketplace so this information is downloadable to investors. As a result, we’ve attracted 30,000 individual investors, the Government, 10 local councils, a university and a range of financial institutions, who are all willing to lend their money because of how transparent we are about performance.

2. Invest in technology that allows your business to scale and grow
We’ve embraced the cloud from the outset. We select technology that enables us to save money, increase productivity and collaboration, like Google Apps for Work. Google Docs and Sheets are particularly valuable tools for the press releases and centralised documents we edit and share across geographies. For example, we recently announced our latest funding round of $65 million and our communications team, based in the UK and US worked very closely together. Docs and Sheets allowed them to collectively craft a strong story about the announcement and share updates. We are using Google Hangouts to help our UK and US offices keep in touch. The tech team is often in Hangouts as they review our web platform and refine our code. The collaborative and inexpensive nature of Hangouts also helps us save money when it comes to travel. The immediacy you get from Hangouts connects you when it matters, where ever you are.



3. People work better when they socialise together
We set out to create a place where people want to work. We bring smart people together and offer them a place to tackle large challenges, and have fun. Our offices are equipped with gaming consoles, ping pong tables, our beloved mini-bar ‘Fundabar’, as well as breakout areas where quick meetings can happen away from your desk. Nurturing the working environment can create a fabric that connects employees even when they’re new to the team. People work better when they socialise with each other and spend their valuable time in a comfortable office environment.

4. Reflect constantly to reinvent how you grow
We’re relentlessly assessing how to reinvent the company and change things. As we grow in size it’s important to avoid being complacent. We maintain a startup culture of moving fast and trying new things. Just because we’ve done things a certain way for the last 6 months or even 4 years, doesn’t mean there isn’t suddenly a better, more efficient way of moving forward. It’s better to take cues from what doesn’t test well, such as a marketing channel or a particular part of the website, and change course rapidly, putting the company in a better position to capture better results and offer a better service. We’re committed to providing the best experience for our customers. This only happens with a constant evaluation of the service and a neverending drive for efficiency.

Posted by Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct


Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct, a leading online investment site and part of the Charles Stanley Group, which has £18bn of investments under management. To learn more, join our Hangout with Charles Stanley Direct on January 23rd. Register here: http://goo.gl/A23N59

As a direct-to-client investment service, our website plays an absolutely critical role in attracting and retaining customers. While we’ve won a number of awards for the quality of our customer service and online trading platform, we realized our site's search functionality was in need of an upgrade.
Clients use our site to search for and view information on funds and stocks to help them weigh their investment decisions. However, Google Analytics showed that between 35-45% of client searches on the site resulted in no matches at all, while 15% of searches came back with thousands of potential results, meaning the right ones were often buried. Search was one of the last tasks clients performed before leaving the site altogether, showing the frustrations they experience in being unable to find what they were looking for.

To tackle these problems in-house would have proved costly and time-consuming, so we looked at a number of hosted providers. When our Google partner Extended Content Solutions Limited demoed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) using our own data, we saw instantly how it would benefit us.
Features like Intelligent Re-Direct enable customers searching, for example, for a subsidiary company to be re-directed immediately to the name of its parent company, which is what you’d actually trade shares in. The Spell Suggestions feature makes searching much faster. The GSA’s Query Expansion feature also provides clients with additional relevant results when they search for certain products or funds, meaning that they are presented with more investment options. Best of all, the GSA was so easy to integrate with our existing systems that we were up and running within a month.

Since deploying the GSA, feedback from our customers has been fantastic. Now, only 5% of searches result in zero matches or an unmanageable number of results, compared with 65% beforehand. We have a 99% click through rate, showing us that users are finding the fund or stock they’re looking for on their first search, whereas previously only 20% of searches actually generated a click-through to view that share or fund. Calls to our contact centre relating to finding information on stocks and funds on the site almost disappeared overnight. The next step for us is adding the ability for customers to search for our videos, which give up-to-date and insightful information on market trends. It’s exciting to think though that we’ve probably only scratched the surface of all the potential the GSA has to offer and how we can use it.

In the months since we’ve deployed the GSA we’ve improved customer retention and acquisition and increased the conversion rates of website traffic to client registrations. As the site goes from strength-to-strength it has paid for itself a number of times over. It is no exaggeration to say that the GSA has completely transformed the role the website plays within our business.