Business Elite 2021 | 23 16 | Q3 2021 Best Real Estate Development Finance Leader, 2021 – London Owing to the pressure and expectations on construction companies, especially throughout the pandemic, SMEs in the industry may at times feel as though they are falling behind. For all peer-to-peer lending and financial advice, Blend Network is an expert lending and finance company that has grown exponentially in recent years. Here, we talk to Chief Strategy Officer Roxana Mohammadian-Molina about the Network’s success and future plans. With fingers in multiple pies, Blend Network is a link between property, finance, and technology. As a specialist real estate lending company, it provides development finance loans to SME property developers as well as mid-size construction companies across the UK. Roxana Mohammadian-Molina is the Chief Strategy Officer of Blend Network, a company founded by Yann Murciano who prior to creating Blend Network was an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley where he spent a decade as the global head of metals trading. Roxana Mohammadian-Molina also comes from the investment banking background having previously spent a decade at Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Working alongside other senior members of Blend Network, Roxana shares that the internal culture of the company is that of diversity. She adds, “Collective teamwork, support for one another, mentorship, encouragement of new ideas, togetherness, and willpower characterise our internal culture.” For its exceptional work, Blend Network won FinTech Business of the Year, 2021, and it has now won Best Real Estate Development Finance Leader, 2021 – London. Not only has it become well-known and respected within its fields, but it has continued to grow through such a difficult time. Roxana tells us, “COVID-19 certainly exacerbated the funding gap, as traditional lenders’ obligation to administer the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) meant they had to refocus their resources.” The CBILS provides SMEs across the UK with support if they are losing revenue due to COVID-19. This is a government scheme to aid those seeing their cashflow decrease and even diminish. This is something that allowed Blend Network to develop strong relationships with these SMEs by offering an active funding lifeline to them. Roxana says, “COVID-19 was an opportunity for specialist lenders like us to show how we can and must be part of the solution to solve the funding gap and help build more homes.” Typically, Blend Network’s clients approach and consult it rather than Blend Network approaching them, due to its strong reputation in the industry. This means that clients generally find Blend Network and want to collaborate; clients know that they can trust Blend Network to deliver. With the future in mind, Blend Network is planning on growing even more, in particular by hiring more to join its lending team. As it continues to hire and expand, the company is looking to more than double its lending. As it has opened new offices to accommodate its ever-flourishing team, Blend Network has had the ability to encourage its new staff as well as nourish its existing members. After winning multiple awards, and making a huge difference to so many SMEs, Blend Network is able to celebrate success, all the while continuing to make plans for a long and exciting future of growth. Contact: Roxana Mohammadian-Molina Web Address: www.blendnetwork.com Aug21319 2 4 59 Pub ic Sector Automatio Firm 2021 – United Kingdom Every sector has inefficient processes that could – and should – be automated. These operational inefficiencies run across all departments and often take time away from serving customers. As a consequence, customers look elsewhere for a better s rvice, and businesses lose £millions through customer churn. It’s a problem that costs businesses £100bn a year, but it doesn’t have to be like this anymore. Cue We Build Bots (WBB) – a company which has cr ated a platform that helps public sector organisations free up human time by developing multilingual AI chatbots. Through its IntelAgent platform, clients can quickly and easily build chat b ts, voice bots, and intelligent process utomation with hardly any coding, or even no coding at all. “Our AI powered software is use by G vern ent and Enterprise ustomers to build new auto ated service channels (voice and chatbot ), or to turn xisting manual chan els (telephone, email, social media) into autonomous channels,” explains a spokesperson from WBB. “Our customer save time a d money, generate revenues, and deliver superior customer (a d employee) experience.” The IntelAgent system has been proven to reduce inbound cont ct centre traffi by up to 60% as customer facing intelligent bots can execute complex processes, as well as answer simple FAQs, which verall has a huge impact on the contact centre and frees up thousands of hours so teams can focus on less repetitive, more rewarding work. “Our bots do the rdinary s your teams can do the e traordinary! We think it’s wrong that £37billion a year is lost by UK companies due to poor customer service. We also t ink it’s wrong that 26% of our time in the workplace is spent on repetitive, manual tasks. We built Int lAgent to solve these issues; to help businesses easily automate ordinary tasks so that teams can focus on delivering extraordinary work, a d customers can rely on extraordinary service.” Building your own bot using the platform couldn’t be simpler. It features an easy to use, drag and drop bot builder which can be integrated with the biggest CRMs, payment systems and ticketing software in just a few clicks. The bot’s capabilities can facilitate self-service for even the most complex of processes, removing millions of manual interactions and it can even be deployed on any channel, such as a website, intranet, in app, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Twitter, SMS, Google Home, Alexa... you get the idea! When customers or colleagues need to talk to a human, IntelAgent will collect all the relevant information, identify the best placed agent (based on the interaction to date), and hand a client’s users over to that agent via live chat or browser call if pr ferr d. It’s also fully cu tomisable so companies can have compl te control over the l ok, feel, tone of voice and even the name f their bots. Intelligent bots need Natural L guage Understanding (NLU). WBB’s NLU training suite eans th t it is quick and easy to contin ously improve your bot’s NLU capabilities and deliver a constantly improving bot experience. Fi ally, here’s an analytics dashboard as IntelAgent collec s, analyses a d visualises data to help better de isions get made. “Our IntelAgent platform has now processed over five million interactions between customers, suppli rs, int r al teams a d partments. That data is coll ct d, analysed and visualised so our customers can better understand, and better serve their inter al and external customers. We ar also ISO27001 ccredited. This is th global g ld standar for people, pr c ss a d IT security. We’re delighted to b recogni ed as having such high standards. And we bring those high standard to every IntelAgent deployment.” With such an innovative offering, and with core values of aintaining high standards and custom r satisfa tion, it’s no surprise that WBB was recently rewarded fo i s hard work wi the title f Best Public Sector Aut m ti Firm 2021 – United Kin d m in the SME Business Elite Awards. Contact Details Contact: Paul Shepherd Comp ny: We Build Bots eb Ad res : w .w b.ai 1 3 t
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