MOGO+ makes inroads with MOGOcheck
Financial software company MOGO+ received some publicity earlier this year for a new consumer product - a mobile app that allows consumers to gain access to all their accounts with a single password.But the company believes its big product is its B2B application, MOGOcheck, which is an account aggregation program that allows lenders to make much faster credit assessments. MOGO+ has signed up five customers since launching the automated income verification system last November. Those customers include an auto finance company, a payday lender and a microfinance company.MOGO+ chief executive Andrew Clouston said loan processing was still blighted by "document warfare"."There is a real opportunity to overcome that," he said. He believes the key is access to transaction account statements.When someone applies for credit, a lender using MOGOcheck sends the applicant a link; the applicant uses the link to provide MOGO+ with access to their bank accounts so that income can be verified.MOGOcheck encrypts the data so it can't be tampered with and formats it for the lender's loan processing system. MOGO+ does not have the customer account login, so it cannot have access to the account once it has downloaded the information it needs.Clouston said the MOGOcheck technology could be compared to the screen scraping applications that have been around for a number of years, but in a more advanced form.Clouston said: "Income verification can be a complex and costly process. Banks tend to ask for a lot of paper because they want to be absolutely certain that their applicant is 100 per cent real."Customers don't always have easy access to pay slips and transaction statements. Automated access to bank accounts gives lenders a great opportunity to make their processes efficient."Since the introduction of tighter regulations covering the short-term lending industry, lenders in that market have been required to review an applicant's bank statements going back 90 days."We get them that information in a couple of minutes," Clouston said.Last year the mortgage processing company FMS took a 20 per cent stake in MOGO+. Clouston said FMS planned to launch its own version of MOGOcheck.