Foqus Finance in Changing Environments

Foqus Finance is a Contract Management System for leasing and loan enterprises, and part of Banqsoft’s Asset Finance Product Portfolio. The solution was established more than 20 years ago in cooperation with finance companies and has progressed ever since. As a product develops over a longer period new technology becomes available. This leads to changes in the way the product looks, its efficiency and desirability to the customers.

This also applies for Foqus Finance and this article will shortly explain how Foqus Finance as a product meets the changing requirements by leveraging possibilities in new technology to provide solutions and built-in industry expertise, to enable its customers to stay competitive in a fully digital processing landscape.

Foqus Finance has a long history and strong customer base, starting in Denmark and later in the Baltic states and the Nordic countries. The leasing and loan customer enterprises are generally small and medium sized, ranging from banks and bank-owned to auto- or equipment maker-owned.

All business models are unique and has its unique needs. To facilitate this, the work process in Foqus Finance from quote to expiration and finally archive, is split into stages. These stages are completely customisable by configuration, meaning the contract flow can be designed to match the individual business and specific demands.

An example can be bank-owned leasing and loan enterprises where selected tasks are handled by the mother company, typical tasks within credit application and KYC (Know Your Customer) related tasks such as AML (Anti-Money Laundering). With Foqus Finance it is possible to design a business flow where i.e., the credit application tasks are either deselected or usage restricted by a permission setup to a selected group of employees.

At the same time leasing and loan enterprises using Foqus Finance are typically operating in high-cost markets and countries. The work process and related tasks are therefore built to be automated, so the contracts can automatically be pushed through the defined flows and on to the next stages. By automating the tasks either on contract flow level or by running scheduled tasks, manual task and hands-on can be reduced, and by that keep the unit cost down for administrating a contract.

Foqus Finance is built on top of the latest Microsoft technology, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as the base of the solution. With Business Central as the base, the users are given a strong application framework and productivity tools to support the daily work. This includes among other sorting, searching, and filtering of data and the users can apply some or all these simultaneously to quickly find or analyse data.

However, anyone working with leasing and loan offerings, especially leasing, knows the complexity of the products. An example can be auto leasing. The contract may have add-on products and services such as insurance, service, tyres, and fuel cards as well as multiple stakeholders. All of this adds to the complexity and may require the users to at some extent understand the underlying data-model to find or analyse data.

In a perfect world all contracts flow through the predefined processes and require a minimum of hands-on. Still, there will always be contracts that deviates from the standard processes, either because of special conditions that may have been agreed upon to make the win, because of delays in the delivery of a car, misunderstandings, or other issues. Again, all of this adds complexity to the operational insights and may challenge the expected profit.

With our release of the latest version of Foqus Finance, there was a shift to a full web based client, to meet the requirements and opportunities in the latest released versions of Business Central. With this shift came new features that opened for rethinking and a redesign of the entry points to Foqus Finance called Role Center to a more user-centric design model.

In redesign the Role Center our primary focus was to secure the combination of activities to be carried out in a full process sequence of a financial product as well as give insights into the flow of business. Another consideration was to meet the known challenges in the complexity of the financial products and insights and by that enabling the users to easily navigate to relevant pages for viewing data and doing tasks. An example can be contract deviation management.

Let’s dive into the example where a delivery of a car has been delayed, and the contract period start has been exceeded. This may result in changed condition for the entered contract. Depending on the recurrence, a first step may be to create a dynamic saved filter on the contract list and by that let the users quickly find the scope of contracts.

Currently, in the wake of the pandemic, the supply chain is challenged, and this results in delays in the delivery of cars. Therefore, the extend of, period start exceeded contracts may require more established and documented routines. With Foqus Finance is it possible to create a sub-status to the establishment stage with a task list in the scope and sequence that the work is to be done. When period start is reached, a scheduled task will change status on the contract to the new sub-status. The user can then directly from the Role Center get insight about number of contracts to be managed and then navigate to the relevant contracts for viewing data and doing tasks.

With a user-centric design model, our aim is not only to make the onboarding of new customers faster, but also to ease onboarding of new users. This way, we flatten the learning curve and enable new users to deliver more valuable services to the customers from the start.

With our release of Foqus Finance version 10, including a fully web-based client, we at Banqsoft further leverage our functional expertise by means of new technology advancements in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform, supporting our Foqus Finance customers to stay ahead of the competition going forward.
Foqus Finance 10 was released on May 18th and is already on its way to the first customers.

 

Rolf Larsen
Senior Product Manager

rolf.larsen@banqsoft.com