For decades Wyth Financial has been at the centre of the business community, helping organizations access the funding they need to thrive.
In early April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began introducing a significant set of new challenges for their customers. Businesses began to struggle and required rapid access to funds to stay afloat. In response, governments around the world introduced relief programs to save businesses by guaranteeing the funds that would be distributed by financial service providers.
One of those programs, administered through the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA), is aimed at helping small businesses remain afloat by covering short-term operating expenses, payroll, and other non-deferrable expenses.
Government relief funds were distributed through Wyth and select banks to manage the governance and auditing of loans for the next 2.5 years. Wyth needed a way to rapidly service the CEBA loans as efficiently as possible to a network of 80+ credit unions across Saskatchewan.
Wyth was faced with a challenge of quickly aligning its processes to this new reality.
Due to the speed required to get funds to those who needed them, traditional approaches that used slow manual processes including front-end forms and patchwork back ends were not an option. Reporting on the funds was going to be required daily and for 2.5 years so solutions managed through Excel or hastily developed code were not an approach that Wyth considered. They knew manual processes wouldn't scale up or hold up to the rigours of ongoing monitoring and would very likely put personal banking data at risk.
Wyth needed a way to ensure its operations department could service the CEBA loans as efficiently as possible and automate much of this manual work. It had to be easy to use, given the varying technical capabilities across Wyth’s 80+ credit union partners. It also had to be customizable for each partner so members felt they were being serviced by their own financial institution; it had to be highly secure, able to issue timely reports and auditable.
There is a crucial need for the private and public sectors to move beyond data sharing and data integration technologies that require data to be copied as it moves between systems — with potentially catastrophic impacts on data privacy and data protection.
Data Fabric offers the bridging technology to not only enable a rapid response for time-sensitive emergency programs, but also to enable the ongoing use of data in a secure platform where it can always be accessed. This simply is not possible with today's models, where every system needs its own data storage solution and users are forced to spend significant amounts of time and money on integration and its byproducts such as ETLs, APIs, reconciliation, and MDM.
After implementing Cinchy’s Data Fabric, Wyth was able to facilitate more than 1200 applications in approximately one week for credit union members to distribute to businesses that urgently needed them. And by adopting this new paradigm, Wyth now has the flexibility to integrate the solution into any system and respond to emerging requirements in real-time, including future COVID-19 relief loan programs and economic stimulus programs like wage subsidies and payment programs.
In partnership with Cinchy, Wyth has been able to respond to the pandemic’s challenges. Thousands of small businesses can now receive much-needed funding from the COVID-19 relief loan. The implementation of Cinchy’s Data Fabric has also been critical to bringing security and true data collaboration across Wyth and its credit union members.
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Fast: 1st Project Wage Subsidy
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Faster: 10th Project Paycheck Protection Program
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Fastest: 100th Project Ongoing Digital Services
