NOW Finance

Could you provide a brief overview of your company, including your industry, purpose/vision, and the size and scope of your business (e.g., number of employees, markets served)?

We've been in operation in Australia for 13 years now. So we started the business in 2012, and we're a consumer finance business that is focused on being a non-bank lender that serves the market with products and services, in niches that the banks aren't very good at.

So our sort of main strategy and vision is to become a leading non-bank funder in those markets.So if we talk about the size of our business, obviously it started 13 years ago with 3 of us, and now we've built it up to - we've got about 160 staff across both Australia and in the Philippines. And, yeah, we're sort of servicing a market that is in the consumer space, so we don't do any commercial business at all. And it's really just with 2 products at the moment. We're looking to expand that product line, but 2 products being auto loans and personal loans.

What is your role within the company, and how do you interact with your team of virtual assistants?

I'm the chief operating officer of the business, so I manage all operations across Australia and in the Philippines, and very actively involved with our VAs in Cebu, at VA Platinum. I have sort of regular - I have 2 of them actually directly reporting to me, the 2 sort of operations leaders in Cebu, but I have weekly meetings with all of the leaders, and our success manager, Van, joins us in those meetings.

So we catch up every Friday, but I'm in regular contact with these guys, and I get over here every 3 months to spend the week with the team.

How many Virtual Assistants do you have with VA Platinum currently and what roles do they fill in your business?

So we have 54 current VAs working in our business over here, and they fill a multitude of roles. So we have people settling out all our deals. So our full settlements function is housed over in the VA Platinum team, as is our whole direct sales. So we have a couple of distribution channels, one being broker introduced and then another one being direct-to-consumer, and our direct-to-consumer sales is fully housed over in VA Platinum. We have software developers here, we have a full early-stage collections team over here, we have our custom service and accreditations team over here, and we have some of our dispute resolution officers over here as well. So we have a full range of functions being serviced by the VAs in Cebu.

How many team members did you start with initially with VA Platinum and what triggered the growth?

We started off with 2 actually nearly 3 years ago. So 3 years ago in February ‘22, we started with 2, and they're just 2 very high-quality individuals. Both of them are still with us, and that gave us a huge amount of confidence to be able to expand the team quite quickly.

You know, the quality of those 2 in terms of their values, their work ethic, you know, how they’re customer-focused, everything just gives us a level of confidence that we could sort of expand. And then we started looking at different functions within our organisation that we could send over offshore, and utilise VA Platform to be able to do that. So started with 2, sort of built it up slowly, and then really in October, I think it was ‘23, no, yes, sorry, October ‘23, we did a quick expansion. So we kept the recruitment team very busy, and between July and October, we added about 30 to 35 people over that period of time. So and we haven't looked back since then.

Can you share specific examples of how having a larger team of VAs has benefited your business?

We've had some enormous wins from moving over 30% of our business to VA Platinum and being offshore. The two key things that stand out for me that we benefit from is our cost-income ratio. So that's a big number for us. So we're a business that's gone from before we offshored everybody, we were 40% cost to income ratio, so you can imagine the expense that we have every year, based on the 40%. We've been able to reduce that to just over 20%, and a lot of that is just due to the - to be able to offshore and the benefits we get of offshoring a third of our business.

The other one is the revenue per employee. So this demonstrates the productivity that we've got - an improved productivity we've got by having people over here. So before we moved 30% of our business over here, we're running at about $500,000 per employee per year. We're now at £750,000 per employee per year. So that's just a pure productivity measure, and we've gone up 50% since offshoring here.

So for me, those are 2 two massive benefits. And if you talk about NPS, our NPS is, yeah, we were sitting at about 65%-67% NPS, which is high. Since we've moved over here, we've been sitting in the 80s. So we certainly haven't seen any downside in terms of NPS since offshoring to to VAP.

How do you manage and integrate a large number of virtual assistants within your existing team structure and processes? What strategies have been most effective?

Our VAs are part of our team. So we've made sure that everybody feels part of the of the board in our finance team. We don't see them as VAP employees. We see them as NOW Finance employees. So we've integrated them into the business. We've had a number of our leaders come across into Australia to come and spend time in our business over there, and we make sure that at least, you know, 9 or 10 months of the year, we've got somebody from Australia coming over here. We want the team over here to feel part of our business, and, you know, I think - we've got to continue to work at it and get better at it, but we certainly feel that they are part of it, are part of the NOW Finance family. So everything we do in Australia, we make sure it happens over here. If we incentivise people in Australia, we'll incentivise people here. If we have rewards in Australia, we'll have rewards over here. And in that way, we sort of try to make the employees over here feel part of the NOW Finance family. And I think we're sort of getting it there, but you can't get complacent with that. We have to continue to make sure that we work hard in integrating the two businesses.

You’ve been working with VA Platinum for a significant period. What has kept you partnering with us over time, and how do we continue to meet your evolving needs?

The main thing for me, and it sounds cliche and it sounds motherhood, but we do see VAP as a true partner. A lot of suppliers are just suppliers, suppliers of a service or a product, whereas we've certainly seen VAP as a partner of our business. So, you know, I think the executive team, you know, Kat, David, Brian, Tash, they've all been very, very accommodating for us. They've always been very open to, change. You know, the amount of times we've asked them to move our offices over here. I think in the time we've been here, we've probably moved about 5 or 6 times, and they've restructured the office. They've redone the office space for us, and nothing's been too much trouble. So we truly see it as a partnership, and I think that's what keeps us comfortable, in building on this partnership. And we expect to do that over the next couple of years, and we're very comfortable doing that with, you know, with the current leadership team at VA Platinum.

Are there any specific aspects of our service, such as support, flexibility, or innovation, that have been particularly valuable as your business has grown?

I think the biggest thing for us is having that conduit between NOW Finance and VA Platinum. So we've been very fortunate over the time to have very good success managers, and, in fact, one of the success managers actually is in our business at the moment working in NOW Finance which has been a nice transition, but we have been very fortunate to have really good success managers going through. I think that's an important part for a business of our size of having sort of 50 to 60 VAs in our business. You have to have that strong conduit between the 2, and all the way through even now and, yeah, we've had magnificent success managers who we treat and feel as part of our business as well. So, I think that's a big plus for us.

How has your perception of outsourcing evolved since you started working with VA Platinum? What have you learned about leveraging VAs as a long-term resource?

We were the true sceptics. So, you know, 3 years ago, there were these 3 of us who, executive directors of the business and we were sort of talking about it and in fact, we specifically went to the market on our website saying, you know, all our functions are Australian-based and we thought there was a big selling point, in Australia. And perhaps at the start, it was the right strategy. But, you know, as we grew and we got bigger and, you know, costs become important or more important, then we had to look at other avenues. So we thought we'd dip our toe in the water.

And as I said earlier, we started off with 2 people thinking, oh, we'll just test the waters with 2 people, and it's expanded, and that's due to the quality. So our minds have changed. We definitely have changed from being a little sceptical about it to being now real promoters of it. And I think we will continue as we expand our business and look to add products and add distribution channels. The big focus for us will be is how do we expand it by being able to expand that the workforce over in Cebu as opposed to expanding the workforce in, you know, necessarily in Australia. So I think our expansion will come from employees in Cebu, and we'll probably be expanding more heavily in Cebu as opposed to in Australia, because of that.

What measurable outcomes have you achieved since scaling up your VA team? (Revenue Growth, Operational Efficiency, Client Satisfaction, Strategic Benefits)

We've had a lot of benefits, and I've mentioned a few of them before. I mean, the biggest benefit for us is the work ethic and the service levels. A lot of our industry is driven by service level agreements we have with, that we put out to the market. So we have to get back response back to customers quickly. We have to settle loans quickly. We have to answer our customer service queries quickly because if we don't, our competitors will do it. That has certainly lifted since we've moved the teams here. So our service level agreements that we've got with our customers have been improved. You know, our ability to be able to get back and service our customers has been with response times have been quicker, and that's not because we've got more people here, it's purely because of the quality of the people that we've got over here.

You know, we've improved I've mentioned our cost-income ratio, I've mentioned our NPS score going up, I've mentioned our revenue per employee going up. So all those metrics are indications of strong productivity, you know, great work ethic, and a good, energised team. So I think those are the main metrics that I would consider being the benefit of us having outsourced the outsourced team.

Are there any examples of how your VAs have helped resolve complex challenges or enabled your business to seize new opportunities?

I think it's ongoing. I think, you know, we put a a lot of emphasis on trying to be better today than we were yesterday. We're trying to put an emphasis on improving ourselves both personally and professionally every day, and to do that, you've got to continue to find better ways of doing things. And, so there's a number of little initiatives that these guys are doing that are improving the way we do things and allowing us to get those cost-income ratios down and the revenue per employee up. So there are examples, but there's so many of these, because these guys are doing it every day, and I think that's that's the important thing for me. It's allowed us to be able to improve the way we do things. And then also with the confidence we have in our VAs, it's what other opportunities can we go to the market within Australia and utilise the resources over to do that.

So, you know, we're looking at offering our auto product, which we only offer through a broker channel. We're now really well down the path of offering it through a direct channel. The only right way we can do that is by expanding our team up here and the only way we can offer it to the market at a cost-efficient way is by having our team up here and manage the whole thing from here. So those are sort of things that, having the team over here has enabled us to do from the business strategy point of view.

What advice would you offer to other businesses considering scaling up their VA teams? Are there any best practices you’d recommend for managing a large group of Offshore Staff to join their local teams?

The first piece of advice, I would say, give it a go. You know, I think, you know, we gave it a go with 2 people and then we sort of, and we're very passionate about the business because we started it from the start. So we are very passionate about it and very protective about it. But we did give it a go, and I think it's the best thing we could have done. Best thing we could have done for our business, best thing we could have done for our shareholders, and it's allowed us to be able to offer expanded opportunities to the market in Australia. It's a 40-odd billion-dollar market that we play in, so there's a lot of opportunity. We've only got a sort of 3% to 4% share of that $40 billion and having a team over here gives us an opportunity to be able to build on that share very quickly.

So my recommendation would be have a go. Treat the team as your own. Don't treat them as a supplier. Treat them as your own team. And if you treat them as your own team, get over here, see them regularly, make them feel part of your business, make them feel that you value them, and I think your business is going to strengthen strength.

Looking ahead, how do you see your partnership with VA Platinum evolving? Are there plans to expand your VA team further or leverage additional services?

Yeah, as I've mentioned before, there's a number of plans to or a number of strategies we've got in place to be able to offer more products and offer through increased distribution channels in Australia. To do that cost-effectively, we have to balance our resourcing across both Australia and in the Philippines with VA Platinum. We’ve got a strategy over the next 2 years to widen our product range, and we've got a strategy to widen our distribution range. In both of those cases, we're going to have to employ more people and most of the employment will happen in VA Platinum.

That will come over time, we'll have organic growth over the next 12 months where we'll have to have increased people over here, but the real growth will come. So that's probably when I'm talking about that, I'm talking probably about 10% or 12% growth over the next maybe 8 to 12 months, but should we go ahead with using these additional distribution channels and products, we'll probably go from, you know, 55-60 people to a 100 people within probably 6 to 8 months of introducing these products and distribution channels. So really great opportunity, for our business, and VA Platinum's given us that opportunity with staff over here.

Would you recommend VA Platinum to other businesses? If so, why?

Definitely. I've now spoken to people over there who've had the similar - had the similar thoughts on outsourcing and felt that it was probably gonna not be a benefit to their business and it was probably gonna see their customer service levels drop and it was gonna see their NPS score drop, and I've given them the examples of what we've gone through.

So, it's hard for people to change people's minds, you know, in talking to a few people, it is hard to get them to grasp what we're doing, but, you know, we're real-life examples of how it's been a massive benefit to our business and it's in fact, it's enhanced our business and improved our business, improved our customer service levels, improved the perception of our customers of our business because of the quality of people we've got over here, in the Philippines. So, I would highly recommend it. I'd be happy to speak to anybody about it because I'm a massive advocate for it now.