ENGIE, a French service firm listed on the stock exchange, will be working with online SME lender October to develop an engagement platform based on “the financial participation of employees in internal projects.”
According to the October team, the financial platform, i-DEAL, was introduced in September of last year and was initially offered to a relatively small group of ENGIE workers. From January 2021, access to the i-DEAL platform will be offered to even more employees, the October team confirmed.
As mentioned in a blog post by October, the idea or concept of ENGIE Finance and ENGIE Transformation Office is to give workers of the group the opportunity to directly support ENGIE’s internal initiatives, becoming lenders and taking part in their success.
Lenders are able to receive monthly principal repayment and they also get monthly interest “based on the performance of these projects,” October noted. They added that the two teams were looking to structure the “alignment of interests” by creating communities of workers closely involved with those who were in charge of commercial development.
As noted by October, the birth of i-DEAL, an internal neo-lending solution, will involve October providing the tools to create a lending platform that matches ENGIE’s overall goal and vision.
October added:
“Our neo-lending technology offers a quick and easy credit experience to ENGIE project managers and the ENGIE Finance team. The employee loan experience is simple and intuitive. The platform is totally plug and play: it complies with all safety requirements while not requiring any technological integration by ENGIE.”
They also mentioned
“ENGIE can benefit from October’s 6 years of experience in the field of online loans. October offers a simple, secure and scalable credit management tool: simplifies workflow, improves document management and increases the speed of decision making. automates the reading and processing of documents.”
During the pilot phase, two initiatives were financed and hundreds of workers reportedly joined the platform. i-DEAL is currently available in French, English and Italian. i-DEAL is October Connect’s first “business case.”