Cashco Accelerates Model Deployment and Unlocks Real-Time Decisioning—Cutting Costs by Over 70%
About Cashco
Cashco Financial is Canada's trusted source for fast, reliable financial support, dedicated to helping underbanked Canadians access the financial services they need. Cashco serves over 150,000 clients through a network of 50+ branches, as well as online. With a mission to provide financial solutions without judgment, Cashco offers a range of services including flexible loans, cheque cashing, income tax filing, and money transfers. Through their partnership with Oscilar, Cashco has enhanced their ability to make quick, data-driven lending decisions while maintaining their customer-centric approach to financial services.
Key use case:
Credit decisioning,
Consumer onboarding
Industry:
Financial Services
Region:
Canada
Case study overview
70%
cost reduction
6 weeks
to implementation
50,000
The Challenge: As a lending business, Cashco's ability to accurately assess risk and make loan decisions was their core competency. However, they had outsourced their entire credit decisioning process to a third party that functioned as a "black box," providing little visibility into how loan approvals, amounts, and terms were determined. With plans to scale operations and launch new financial products, Cashco couldn't effectively optimize their underwriting criteria, respond to market changes, or gain insights from their customer data. Changes to decisioning models took months to implement, severely limiting their ability to innovate or adapt to changing market conditions. Without in-house data science capabilities and adequate testing tools, Cashco couldn't effectively differentiate themselves in a competitive lending market.
The Outcome: With Oscilar, Cashco gained complete control over their decision-making process, reducing costs by 70% while implementing changes in days rather than months. The platform's flexibility and integration capabilities have allowed them to expand into new ventures and product lines with minimal effort.
The Oscilar Impact
Complete Control of Decisioning
Oscilar empowered Cashco to bring their decision engine in-house, giving them full transparency and control over their models. This allowed them to understand, modify, and optimize their decisioning process without relying on third parties.
Enhanced Decision Speed
Customer decisions are processed in under a second, contributing to Cashco's goal of 3-minute total customer onboarding and significantly improving customer experience.
Operational Independence
Non-technical team members can now configure and update the decision engine without heavy reliance on engineering resources, enabling business users to implement changes directly.
Seamless Expansion to New Ventures
Cashco was able to implement Oscilar in a new fintech venture in just 3 days, leveraging existing data and models to support new product lines.
Oscilar is really that next generation of decision modeling. When I was looking at some of the other, bigger companies, the usability just wasn't really great. Oscilar started fresh with how it should be for the next generation of decision engines. If people want to consider themselves in that next generation and that fintech type peer group, the ones that are really innovating and at the front end of engineering, this is the right tool for that because it's going to support those bigger ambitions.
Alex Nuth
A black box approach limiting growth and innovation
When Alex Nuth joined Cashco as Chief Digital and Product Officer, the company stood at a critical inflection point. Having secured external capital to fuel significant growth, they needed to modernize their technology stack—particularly their decisioning engine, which remained completely out of their control.
"We had outsourced our decisioning to another third party that was managing all of our data and models," Alex explained. "We didn't really have any control over them." This created a troublesome "black box" situation where Cashco couldn't understand what factors were driving decisions or how their models were making predictions.
The outsourced arrangement constrained Cashco's ability to adapt and optimize. Changes to models required months to deploy, leaving them unable to respond quickly to market changes. Making even minor adjustments to decision rules required significant engineering resources, creating bottlenecks and preventing business users from directly implementing necessary changes.
"We wanted to bring data science closer to us," Alex noted. "We wanted to learn the data science skill set so that we could improve our models as our business was adjusting as opposed to long lead times."
Testing limitations made it nearly impossible to assess the potential impact of updates before deployment. "The ability to do shadow testing, parallel testing, and back testing was really challenging for us," Alex shared.
As Cashco prepared for significant growth, these constraints became increasingly problematic. They needed a solution that would give them more control, transparency, and agility—one that would not only meet their current needs but also position them to leapfrog competitors in the market.
A next-generation decisioning platform that put Cashco in control
In their search for a decisioning platform, Cashco evaluated numerous options, but found most traditional platforms had not modernized enough to meet their requirements.
"When I was looking at some of the other bigger companies, you would actually have to learn different coding languages to be able to work within their models," Alex explained. "The usability just wasn't really great."
Oscilar stood out as something different—a platform built from the ground up for the modern digital era. Rather than evolving legacy systems, Oscilar had "started fresh with how it should be for the next generation of decision engines."
At the heart of Oscilar's solution was an intuitive workflow builder that allowed Cashco's team to create and modify decision trees easily, without specialized coding knowledge. This visual approach democratized access to the decision engine, enabling business users to implement changes directly.
The platform's architecture was designed for seamless integration, featuring robust APIs and excellent documentation. "Every single vendor that we've had to put data into and have connected to Oscilar has been the easiest part of our projects," Alex noted.
Oscilar's comprehensive testing environment was transformative, providing powerful tools for shadow testing, parallel testing, and back testing. These capabilities allowed Cashco to experiment with new approaches and optimize their models with confidence.
The platform's visual analytics made it easier for business users to understand the impact of decision rules and make data-driven adjustments. This transparency was exactly what Cashco had been missing in their previous "black box" setup.
Perhaps most importantly, Oscilar's architecture allowed Cashco to deploy changes quickly—sometimes daily—enabling rapid response to market changes. The platform also enabled them to create a unified view of customer data across different products as they expanded into new ventures.
Throughout implementation and beyond, Oscilar's support team proved invaluable. Unlike many vendors that required expensive professional services for every change, Oscilar provided guidance as part of their standard service. This comprehensive solution enabled Cashco to take control of their decisioning process while significantly reducing costs.
The outcome: Transformed decisioning capabilities driving business agility and growth
The transformation began with implementation—a process typically taking months with traditional platforms but completed in just 5-6 weeks with Oscilar.
The most immediately apparent benefit was the cost reduction. "Oscilar ended up costing about a third of what we were paying before," Alex revealed. "So we saved 70%." This remarkable efficiency didn't come at the expense of capabilities—Cashco gained significantly more control while reducing expenditure by more than two-thirds.
The speed of decision-making also increased dramatically. Changes to models that had previously taken months could now be deployed in days or even hours. This newfound agility enabled Cashco to respond rapidly to market conditions, with some changes being deployed daily.
For customers, decisions that once took considerable time are now processed in under a second, contributing to Cashco's goal of completing the entire customer onboarding in just three minutes. The platform transformed internal operations as well. Data scientists can now implement business rules directly without engineering dependencies. The frequency of model updates increased dramatically—from monthly to weekly changes—allowing Cashco to continuously optimize their decisioning.
With fully automated decisioning, manual overrides have been reduced to less than 1% of decisions. The few cases requiring manual review are typically due to missing data rather than disagreements with the automated decision.
As Cashco expanded into new ventures, they implemented Oscilar in a new fintech venture in just three days. "We integrated it with Oscilar so that we could use the models and data from the core business in this new venture," Alex explained. This ability to quickly extend their decisioning capabilities has been a significant competitive advantage.
A Look Ahead
Looking ahead, Cashco is interested in expanding their use of Oscilar beyond underwriting to include collections models, recovery predictions, and customer communication strategies. They're also integrating additional data sources to support new product lines, including secured lending and card products.
As Cashco continues to grow, Oscilar remains a crucial partner in their journey to build a modern, efficient lending operation—one that now has the agility and control to truly differentiate itself in the market.
70%
cost reduction
6 weeks
to implementation
60,000
decisions processed weekly
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