It seeks to revolutionise the financial services and fraud detection markets
September 22, 2015: UK FinTech company, Hello Soda announced its expansion into the United States with the opening of a New York office and recruitment of two new heads of sales.
The US office and hiring of experienced new recruits, Layton Brooks and Oliver Peckham, will enable Hello Soda to push further into the US market and develop an established brand presence in the North-American market.
 Oliver Peckham |
Layton Brooks is focused on new business and expansion of Hello Soda products in North America. With vast operational FinTech experience and a client-network in North America and Australia, Brooks will establish a significant international footprint for the company and ensure Hello Soda technology is adopted internationally. |
| Oliver Peckham has responsibility for driving new business sales, primarily in the US market. Peckham has experience working for leading UK FinTech companies and at Hello Soda will be responsible for driving sales across the US market and the alternative lending landscape. |  Layton Brooks |
Hello Soda has been attracting interest from some of the world’s biggest alternative lenders, banks and insurance companies following its development of technology platform PROFILE which helps reduce fraud and improve responsible lending and borrowing.
Using Bayesian Belief Network principles, PROFILE analyses structured data such as the number of Facebook friends someone has, and generates predictions from unstructured data like blog posts, tweets and social interactions.
Plugging a gap in the industry, the technology helps companies understand a person as an individual and aims to take advantage of the fact that traditional credit rating models are based on historical financial performance, and do not take into account a person’s ‘true’ and real-time circumstance.
But it’s not just creditworthiness that Hello Soda’s platform is being used for, propensity to commit fraud, employee vetting, and insurance claimants’ trustworthiness are just some of the issues the technology is being put to use to resolve.
Commenting, CEO of Hello Soda, James Blake said: “Our decision to expand into the USA has come off the back of success we have already had in North America. With 40% of our clients already US based, this was the natural next step for us and we hope the start of further expansion internationally where there is a strong appetite for technology that can aid customer insight not only for better risk pricing and fraud prevention but also to increase customer acquisition, retention and cross sell up sell identification.”