How Stitch Financial Data powers FlexClub’s smart vehicle recommendation engine

Problem: When vehicle subscription platform FlexClub began offering private subscriptions to individual customers, they needed a fast and secure way to assess potential customers’ affordability and recommend vehicles that fell within their budgets.

Stitch solution: With Stitch Financial Data, customers can easily link their bank accounts rather than uploading manual statements, enabling the FlexClub team to instantly and confidently access their financial data to assess affordability and provide them with vehicles faster.

Result: Today, Stitch powers FlexClub’s vehicle recommendation engine, enabling them to provide tailored options and keep dropoff at a minimum. This has led to an improved onboarding process and increased conversion rates.

FlexClub launched in 2019 with a goal of enabling more people to affordably access the vehicles they need – whether for income generation or day-to-day activities. Today FlexClub offers a flexible subscription marketplace for customers in South Africa and Mexico, providing the latest and best quality cars and motorbikes.

“When we started, we were working primarily with Uber drivers. There are a lot of drivers that rent day by day, which is extremely expensive, and they often can’t access traditional financing from a bank. We wanted to find a way to get them more affordable access.”

– Cornelia Reh, Head of Product at FlexClub

While drivers in the ride-hailing space continue to rely on FlexClub, last year the team also opened the platform to private customers and businesses, and they’ve since seen significant growth.

Stitch helps FlexClub improve their onboarding experience, powers new vehicle recommendation engine

In order to apply for a vehicle, FlexClub customers must first complete KYC and affordability checks. With Stitch, they have the option to do so by linking their bank accounts on the FlexClub platform, rather than uploading manual bank statements. This allows the FlexClub team to quickly and confidently assess their affordability – and get them a vehicle faster.

“Using Stitch reduces our risk drastically. Manual bank statements can be fake and need to be manually assessed by us, which takes a lot of time and effort.”

When customers link their accounts via Stitch, the FlexClub team can view their transaction history and balance details to determine whether that customer can in fact sustainably afford the vehicle they wish to subscribe to. For FlexClub, that means the customer can afford to make payments on time and in full, on a regular basis.

However, while they have significantly improved their user experience and eliminated fraud since integrating Stitch, the team was still seeing higher rates of dropoff than they’d like – particularly for those customers that may have selected a vehicle outside of their budget.

In response, the FlexClub team worked closely with Stitch to iterate on their onboarding flow, moving the affordability check up sooner to keep customers engaged and to provide more immediate feedback, even for those that won’t ultimately be customers of FlexClub. They also developed a vehicle recommendation engine that can help customers select vehicles that fit within their budgets. This new feature provides alternative options for those customers that would have previously been turned away – thereby improving conversion rates.

“Based on customers’ financial data, we can calculate which vehicles they can or cannot afford and recommend different options. For instance, if they were applying for a car that costs R7k per month, but we see that based on their income they can likely only afford to pay R6k per month, rather than losing that customer completely we can come back and recommend other similar vehicles on our platform that are available for up to R6k per month,” Reh said. They can also suggest higher value vehicles to those customers who might be able to afford more.

Leveraging financial and behavioural data to encourage behaviour change

Today, FlexClub members pay a flat monthly subscription fee for their vehicles. However, the team recently launched the FlexClub rewards program, which enables all private members to receive rewards in the form of discounted fees based on factors such as: safe driving habits, loyalty to FlexClub, on-time payments and referrals. To understand and track members’ driving behaviour, the team has partnered with automotive safety company, Autoliv.

Based on this data, the team develops risk profiles for their drivers and offers reduced pricing if a driver is considered lower risk – in the hopes of enabling positive behaviour change. These insights can also be shared with vehicle suppliers seeking to understand the risk profiles of those driving their vehicles.

FlexClub’s impact

Today, FlexClub has helped more than 1000 drivers access essential vehicles. We look forward to working closely with the team as they use financial data in even more ways to innovate on the future of driving.

Interested in accessing customer Financial Data to power a better onboarding experience? You can get Stitch Financial Data for free for 3 months when you integrate LinkPay. Get in touch at sales@stitch.money.