Growth Street addresses liquidity demand after student feedback
GROWTH Street has made improvements to its liquidity demand management processes following feedback from postgraduate students from University College London (UCL).
The peer-to-peer finance marketplace has been collaborating with UCL for two years, giving students access to three years of anonymised finance data from small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
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The students, from UCL’s Business Analytics MSc, used the data to model multiple scenarios and make recommendations for Growth Street and the wider SME lending industry.
Two students provided a solution to Growth Street’s marketplace liquidity demand management – balancing the supply of money from investors and the near-term demand from SMEs. If there is too much supply investors’ money will not get matched as frequently, but if there is too little Growth Street would not be able to fund as many businesses at competitive rates.
Greg Hinch, head of product at Growth Street, claimed the marketplace has been able to harness the students’ insights to deliver a more robust service to UK SMEs.
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Greg Carter, chief executive of Growth Street, added that the collaboration delivered insight for the firm while providing an opportunity for students to build on their knowledge with real-world application of theories developed in the classroom.
“Entering into this collaboration, it was important to us that we could deliver real benefits to the students involved,” he said.
“Rather than confining them to the hypothetical, we have always sought out real business problems for them to help solve.”
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