Supporting businesses in Wales
For businesses to thrive, they need finance. The Development Bank of Wales was set up by the Welsh Government to support the economy of Wales by making it easier for businesses to get the finance needed to start-up, strengthen and grow.
With a portfolio of over 2,500 customers, the Development Bank of Wales offers loans from £1,000 and equity investment up to £10 million. Seed and later stage equity investment is available for pre-revenue technology-based start-ups and more mature businesses in Wales.
The impact of COVID
The Development Bank’s loan customer base increased significantly during 2020 as a result of the emergency loan support made available by Welsh Government to support businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 Wales Business Loan Scheme (CWBLS) announced on 30 March 2020 invested £92 million and resulted in 1300 new customers for the Development Bank.
It was therefore vital that the Development Bank had the right technology infrastructure in place to service their customers along with a means of incorporating these new funds into their business as usual operations to maintain business continuity and ongoing control.
David Staziker, Chief Financial Officer at the Development Bank of Wales explains: “Alongside a number of support measures introduced by Welsh Government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the CWBLS scheme has helped to safeguard over 16,000 jobs in Wales and will certainly be a key driver of our economic recovery.
We are now supporting over 2,500 Welsh businesses with their commercial loans. This huge shift in volume meant that we had to move quickly over a short period to ensure the smooth migration of our CWBLS customer accounts into daappa software.
As always, the team at daappa has been very responsive and a pleasure to work with. They’ve stood by us every step of the way and ensured that the integration of data was straightforward and pain free.”
Operational support
daappa has supported the software operations of development banks globally, for over fifteen years with our daappa Core (Core) module. Core is a powerful, adaptable data processing engine, servicing Private Asset accounting, administration, shareholder services and custom reporting. With its API abilities it makes integration with other data sources easy, providing users centralised, accurate and reliable information.
Our business relationship with the Development Bank of Wales spans more than ten years, and with the assistance of their dedicated daappa consultant, we were able to straightaway propose an existing solution to resolve this. The team explained their immediate need to expedite the on boarding over 1,300 new CWBLS customer accounts with high volumes of new data to their existing Core platform.
daappa’s solution
Understanding the Development Bank’s requirements, we recommended they use our Import Tool. This data migration tool, a standard part of Core, provides a quick and easy way to upload and validate large volumes of data. Supported by our wider in-house expertise, we assisted the Development Bank in the onboarding of their data, as they continued servicing their customers.
