How Plenti Cut Credit Decision Time by 50% to Scale Lending

Plenti is one of Australia’s fastest growing non-bank lenders specialising in car, personal, and renewable-energy loans, with a loan book over $2.5 billion.

Fully digital and operating for over a decade, Plenti prioritises fast, seamless service for borrowers.

Like many lenders, manual processes were slowing down Plenti’s operations – particularly when it came to credit assessment, including document-based income verification and fraud detection.

Nick Couzios, Credit Risk Manager at Plenti explains “Before Fortiro, credit assessment was manual – the checking of payslips, cross-checking details across documents, entering data, validating documents weren’t fraudulent… it was very time-consuming and inefficient. There really weren’t other solutions available.”

The Challenge: Manual Document Checks Slowing Growth

When Couzios joined Plenti nearly eight years ago, he managed the credit team. At the time, reviewing payslips and verifying applicant income was a fully manual process. Fraud checks involved scouring metadata and making time-consuming calls to verify the authenticity of income documents.

This created bottlenecks, limiting growth potential. They turned to Fortiro to automate document-based income verification and enhance fraud detection, starting with payslips.

“We introduced Fortiro to kickstart automation, and it’s had a very positive impact.”

The Solution: Automation at the Core of Risk Prevention

Plenti integrated Fortiro into its workflow to automate payslip data extraction and fraud detection. Initially deployed via browser UI, it later moved to API integration, embedding Fortiro’s fraud checks and income verification directly into Plenti’s loan engine.

Today, Plenti uses the Fortiro product suite – Accelerate, Protect and Redact – embedded into their credit engine. The result? A significant reduction in application processing time, enhanced fraud detection, and seamless redaction of sensitive information from tax returns.

“We’ve halved our credit assessment time – from around 20 minutes to just 10. That’s allowed us to grow twofold, threefold … fivefold.”

Fortiro now automatically extracts data from payslips and flags suspicious documents in seconds, with a growing number of evolving fraud indicators that Couzios said are making “all the difference in terms of detecting even the slightest of discrepancies on how documents are created”.

Redaction of Tax File Numbers (TFNs), once handled manually by an internal team, is now fully automated, enabling faster compliance with data privacy standards.

Tangible ROI: Time Savings, Accuracy and Scalable Growth

• Processing Time Reduced by 50%
   “We were probably assessing applications in 20 minutes prior to Fortiro, now it’s 10 minutes.”
• Real-Time Fraud Detection
   “We’re detecting fraud within a matter of seconds or minutes, compared to hours just a couple years ago.”
• Automated Redaction
   “All the work that we used to do manually is now being done within seconds by the machine, saving hours of work per week.”
• Clear ROI
   “Fortiro has been a great investment. It picks up fraud you’d miss with human eyes and automates the most painful parts of the process.”

Looking Ahead: Automation is Mission-Critical

Plenti are looking to continue their rapid growth trajectory, on track to double in the coming years. To support that growth, automation is a priority.

“Automation is the number one priority for our growth goal of achieving a $5 billion loan book within the next 5 years. And credit assessment is the hardest part to automate, so it’s a paramount focus. Fortiro is crucial to that.”

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