As the UK gradually starts to ease trading regulations from lockdown, now is perhaps the time to recognise the impact that fintech applications have had on consumers. From adapting industries to home-schooling and dealing with chat-bots.
Here are three tech companies who have seen dramatic changes resulting from the extreme COVID-19 measures:
Leadoo Marketing Technologies is a Finnish MarTech company that concentrates on website lead conversion by enabling its clients to engage using chatbot conversations. Leadoo’s platform has a track record of generating an average of between a 30 – 100% increase in lead conversions for businesses.
Mikael da Costa is the Founder he said that during the COVID-19 crisis the company had seen unprecedented interest in their chatbot service from businesses wanting to maximise their online engagement in the absence of face-to-face opportunities.
He said, “This is a hard time for small and medium businesses, particularly ones that need more leads and more sales. They need to make their websites work much harder for them to generate business and they now need to make online improvements at speed. The first days of lockdown showed an increase of 50% in online conversions among our +600 clients websites which suggest people have not and won’t stop spending but companies have now got to be ready to handle this online engagement.”
Luke Polach is the Founder of Buildiro Direct, which launched to the building trade a few months before lockdown. With limited ability to source materials during the crisis, Buildiro is busier than ever. Polach said, “Before coronavirus we were gaining good traction and feedback as it saved builders and other trades a massive amount of time travelling to source parts and supplies. But since lockdown we have seen a 54% jump in orders as stores have closed temporarily or have reduced service. We also launched our Buildiro Direct service to consumers at the beginning of May with an under three hour delivery time, and we are seeing a lot of interest as this is the perfect opportunity to do DIY and jobs round the house, but getting fast deliveries had been near impossible till now.”
Buildiro is the world’s first mobile app for materials procurement to solve the key challenge for tradespeople of knowing stock availability, thereby eliminating wasted time spent driving to merchants to source items. For consumers, the app helps UK DIYers who can’t get to (or don’t want to go to) DIY stores. With over 20,000 items in stock from cables to garden tools, it delivers products directly to people’s homes in less than three hours within Greater London and is currently expanding into other UK cities.
MentalUP is an award-winning brain game app for children between 4 and 13 years with five million users worldwide. Understanding the home school need during lockdown, it has offered its app at a discount to help UK teachers, parents and those working from home while needing to step in as a temporary teacher.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing, Founder Resit Dogan said: “It’s been pretty tough, with parents adjusting to having their kids home full time during the lockdown, with many still trying to do some work themselves and home school. So, we offered parents a 30% discount on MentalUP, our scientific-educational game app for 4-13 years olds, and the uptake has been phenomenal with a 500% increase in subscriptions. Parents wanted something that gave their children a chance to improve cognitive skills and educate them in a gamified format that is safe with no ads or harmful content.”
MentalUP believes the ability to solve problems and think in new creative ways is as important as literacy and numeracy skills and they have devised a series of brain games that expose learners to new types of problems and the different ways of thinking required to solve them.
For most companies these different ways of thinking have offered immediate solutions, from remote events to banking bailouts it’s clear that innovative companies can use fintech to adapt to consumer change even quicker than most markets.
