With a recent partnership venture in India, Hello Soda can now proudly flaunt its global presence across four countries- UK, US and Thailand being the earlier ones. Having built a strong team since its inception, 2016 has been a good year for the company. It saw the business go from strength to strength by growing 70 clients across 5 continents and fetching 5 awards including the KPMG’s Fintech 100 Emerging Stars.

The curiosity might well mount high on knowing what Hello Soda is all about? As interesting as the work that this start-up does, the story of its foundation is much more intriguing. Let’s find out a lot more about Hello Soda in this week’s startup story.

Hello Soda- the how, where and when?

Hello Soda, a global big data analytics company, headquartered in Manchester UK was founded by James Blake in 2013. It creates advanced software solution PROFILE which is utilized across various industries including financial services, telecommunications, and ecommerce.

After working in a large Credit Referencing Agency, James Blake founded the company out of a frustration over the lack of access to services they need due to the persistent reliance on traditional data such as that from the Credit Bureau.

Online data is fast overtaking data from traditional sources like the credit bureau, which can often be out of date or lacking in depth. With traditional techniques, consumers are no longer treated as unique individuals, and they miss out on potentially life-changing opportunities, like loans, mortgages and jobs, while businesses miss out on revenue.

Hello Soda to the rescue:

Hello Soda creates multilingual software as a solution to facilitate the move into the digital age while still enabling an element of personalization. With consumer consent, PROFILE analyses data from consumers’ digital footprints and combines it with traditional data to deliver unique insights into your customer’s interests, lifestyle, and more to verify identity, reduce fraud, asses risk, and personalize the user journey to allow businesses to make more informed decisions in real-time.

In this tech era, leveraging digital data as an alternative to the traditional data can enable individuals with little-to-no credit history to establish risk and identity profiles.

During a recent study with Visa, it was derived that a higher propensity for unbanked individuals, including Millennials or those new to country, to engage with formal financial institutions could be achieved through replacing tiresome application processes with social data driven processes.

The road to India:

India is ranked as 3rd in the world for number of smartphone users, clearly indicating that the market for innovative technology is huge. Tapping on this opportunity Hello Soda recently ventured out in India to give some relief to its struggle to boost financial inclusion amongst its underserved and unbanked populations.

The company strongly believes that the availability of PROFILE will vastly improve the ability for businesses to gain visibility on those lacking in formal identity documents or traditional credit data, and propel Indian businesses into a more personalised digital future.

A word from the founder:

CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Soda, James Blake said “We are passionate about ensuring that consumers get access to services that they need and that they don’t miss out because of a lack of credit history or identification documents. That’s why we created PROFILE, which is now rolled out across 5 continents in multiple languages”.

With merely three years of its inception, Hello Soda has successfully boosted financial inclusion and acquisition in many companies by offering an alternative way for consumers to verify their identity and apply for financial services through PROFILE.

He signs off with a note “In less than a year, we have expanded our worldwide presence to three continents and the launch of Hello Soda India adds to our existing offices in the UK, US, and South East Asia. The partnership enables the rolling out of PROFILE to India and surrounding countries with a strong base to ensure dedicated, continuous support.”