The Fintech Times sat down with Martin Toha, CEO and Co-Founder of Array to discuss the company and how in the lending landscape, there is a heightened focus on financial wellness from consumers and growing demand for transparency.
Tell me more about Array
Array provides world-class personalised consumer credit, identity, and financial wellness tools through its API and library of embeddable components that help our clients deepen relationships with users during every interaction throughout the customer journey.
With Array’s embeddable tools, companies are able to solve customer engagement, customer acquisition and retention challenges for fintechs, financial institutions, and digital brands while producing customer insights for their clients.
Our embeddable tools allow clients to create a fully customised offering with little engineering effort that can be deployed in weeks. Array manages compliance and enables customers to have the flexibility to display one, two, or three bureau reports with the ability to switch as needed. We offer three main products to our clients:
- My Credit Manager: Can be delivered online or through a mobile app, is a library with over 25 embedded credit tools that illuminate a users’ credit report, score components, and alerts. Includes a 3 Bureau Report and Score, KBA Authentication, Score Tracker, Credit Alerts, Score Simulator, Credit Lock, Direct Dispute and more.
- Offers Engine: Segments leads by credit profile that allows our clients to target offers and workflows and offer their users the right product at the right time. Includes a track of user intent, embedded marketplace offers, enhanced marketing efforts, and more.
- ID Protect: Includes identity monitoring, insurance and restoration services to help customers keep users safe and earn loyalty through security.
What was the inspiration behind founding the company?
I’m a founder at heart, and after exiting my previous two companies, I started a direct-to-consumer credit monitoring business and realised there was more room for innovation in the credit space.
Array was really founded from a place of curiosity. We asked ourselves—why don’t fintechs and financial institutions offer more robust credit experiences for their users? The credit monitoring and identity protection space is very complicated and dealing with the three credit bureaus isn’t often straightforward. However, it is vital for consumers to have access to this data, and to know that their data is secure.
We realised that fintechs and financial institutions would likely need to engage a third party to offer more robust experiences–both to reduce costs and time to market. With this, we identified that by embedding financial service offerings within platforms, fintechs, and financial institutions, they could improve customer experiences and increase customer retention substantially. That’s why we created Array — a toolkit of embeddable solutions that help fintechs and financial institutions deploy innovative credit and identity protection offerings to the market more quickly. With these solutions, we also equip our clients with actionable insights into their customer base to better inform marketing decisions.
What makes you unique?
Array offers a suite of embeddable tools that are easily customisable to deliver fully branded white-label solutions to our clients, reducing the need for complex engineering to turn raw credit data into actionable insights and a seamless user experience.
The platform allows companies to access credit data directly through its API. By connecting to all three credit bureaus, Array allows our clients to offer flexibility to their customers while reducing time to market to offer credit services.
Additionally, by providing fintechs and financial institutions with this customer data and insights, we empower organisations to rapidly expand and deepen customer relationships across a number of industries.
What were some of the challenges in creating and running your company?
We have to remain laser-focused on our clients and the needs of their end-users. Consumers’ financial needs are always evolving, which means our clients are always looking for new solutions to support their end users’ financial wellness. This is both a challenge and a major opportunity for Array.
It is also very important that we recruit the best talent, and that is a difficult process that takes a lot of time, especially in a remote environment. I’m very proud of our global team and that we’re able to be efficient and successful from all over the world, but as we grow, our workforce will too.
What does the credit landscape look like today and why did you choose to reshape the credit space?
Today, many companies offer free credit scores, but fewer offer credit lifecycle management solutions, such as insights about what impacts creditworthiness and how to improve it. There is also a heightened focus on financial wellness from consumers and growing demand for transparency and greater access to financial information to help inform better decisions.
We also understand the essential role fintechs and financial institutions play in helping people better understand their financial situations. By providing embedded credit solutions for fintechs and financial institutions, we are reshaping the consumer credit space by empowering consumers with actionable insights into their credit that can impact their financial wellness.
What are the key trends you’re seeing at the moment?
The consumer credit landscape has changed a lot over the past few years as consumer credit data and credit scores have taken on additional meaning. We now see credit scores and data used for a variety of reasons, from the traditional evaluation of loan eligibility to newer uses such as BNPL or alternative data applications. That, coupled with consumers placing more importance on financial wellness, has changed the way people and businesses interact with credit data.
All of this underscores the need for fintechs and financial institutions to play a role in expanding access to this information, building trust with consumers and helping them make better decisions about their finances.
How do these trends affect Array’s plans, are you answering them?
The greater focus on financial wellness and gaining access to information is what drives our roadmap and efforts to create an ever-expanding toolkit of API-driven embeddable solutions that help our clients deploy these types of offerings more quickly. We are focused on providing solutions that help companies solve for this trust and transparency conundrum and meet customers’ needs.
What are your plans for the future?
We are constantly innovating and looking for opportunities to expand our platform and product offerings. In addition to fintechs and financial institutions, we are beginning to look at adjacent opportunities to extend our mission where driving engagement within financial wellness is a top priority.
We are also committed to building out our worldwide workforce and continuing to attract top talent as we scale.
