Ivelin Kamburov
CFO and board of directors member, Credissimo
Ivelin Kamburov holds an internationally recognised ACCA qualification and is a member of The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, UK. Kamburov is winner of the CFO of the Year 2016 award in the Liquidity and Risk category granted by EY Bulgaria and Forbes magazine.
What are the main factors impacting the performance of Credissimo so far?
We believe that a company’s success is above all the result of a well-established team. At present, our company employs over 120 professionals, who on a daily basis strive to improve our work processes and the products and services we offer.
As a consumer-oriented company, our primary goal is to provide our customers with convenient and quick solutions when they need short-term financing. Our achievements in recent years, related to the innovative solutions we have introduced, are another proof that we are able to respond adequately to consumer demand by continuously expanding our technology expertise and competencies in line with global trends in our sector.
Through the entrepreneurial spirit of the business model we are developing, the multiple innovations and creative concepts for our products and markets, we have become a long-standing leader in the field of online microcredit and financial services. We believe that innovation is what distinguishes us from our competitors, and this became clear from the first place we were awarded by Bulgarian consumers in the only consumer ranking in the country – My Love Marks.
You talk a lot about innovations, what are the achievements of the company in this area and what is in the pipeline?
Credissimo was the first company in Bulgaria to introduce an entirely online-based application and approval process, a new method for validation of bank accounts, and automated processing of payday loan applications. This made it possible for our clients to go through the application process in just minutes.
Our innovative technologies allow us to instantly verify the identity of a customer and the bank account they want to use to obtain their credit. The verification is carried out by means of communication with a third-party application called Instantor, which was first integrated in Bulgaria by us, laying a new milestone in the prevention of fraud and customer data protection.
Another revolutionary solution for the market was the introduction of the automated chatbot service for granting online consumer loans that is available on the most commonly used messaging platform – Facebook Messenger. There was no other similar service worldwide at the time and it was entirely developed by Credissimo’s IT department. The chatbot, through a conversation with the user, completes all the necessary fields for the credit application process and in this way it saves the client time.
Earlier this year we adopted the Bitcoin cryptocurrency as an official payment tool for faster and more efficient customer service. There are no comparable solutions in the Bulgarian market.
The next steps ahead of us are related to the introduction of an artificial intelligence assistant.
After successfully positioning the company in the Macedonian market, you entered the Polish market in 2016. What are your long-term and short-term expectations?
The market of financial services targeting individual consumers in Poland is extremely developed and diversified in terms for participants, solutions, and products. We are proud that despite the big names that already have years of experience in this market, still technological solutions, such as our chatbot, are not widespread. This gives us a strong competitive advantage right from the start, and our long-term expectations are to establish ourselves and maintain leadership in our market niche. Evidence of our strong positioning in Poland is the fact that our company was accepted as a full member of the Loan Companies Association (ZFP), even before we officially started our operations in the country.
The expansion we are planning on foreign markets will be largely based on our CRM system, which can be implemented with minimal changes in every country where we begin operations, like we did in Macedonia and Poland.