Business Essentials will support companies with their business-use mobile phone expenditure through a new finance initiative.

To help small companies with the often expensive process of upgrading staff to the latest devices, O2 Business is separating the monthly tariff from the cost of purchasing handsets, something traditionally not available when signing a contract. With Business Essentials, they can pay for the device outright and only pay for airtime to reduce monthly spend. Or small business owners can spread the cost of the device with a 0% representative APR loan over 24 months.

Underpinning this initiative is Equiniti Pancredit’s flagship product Core Pancredit, a complete loan application, administration and collections system, which currently serves a number of major UK banks, financial institutions and high-street lenders. Core Pancredit has been fully integrated into O2 Business’ online and call centre-based systems, including real-time integration with Salesforce CRM and BACS processing, to enable its employees to digitally process loan handling and hosting on a single platform. It also facilitates real-time contract signing through its electronic signature to enhance the point of sale end-user experience.

This is the first live implementation from Equiniti Pancredit which is being delivered together with parent company Equiniti. Equiniti IT Services provided the resilient, high availability hosted solution for the O2 Business project, which will ensure that stringent SLAs are met. This includes 99.5% round the clock systems availability and no more than one unplanned outage within a one month period.

Paul Lawton, General Manager of SMB at O2 Business says: “When developing Business Essentials, we needed a solution that could provide the best customer experience. We wanted to ensure that the process was user-friendly for our customer service team and nimble enough for business customers applying online. Equiniti Pancredit was the perfect fit.”

Graham Donald, Managing Director at Equiniti Pancredit adds: “Our partnership with O2 marks a significant move for us into a new market and is our first delivered project which integrates the specialisms of Equiniti IT Services. Business loan provision is diversifying and more organisations are needing the support of dedicated loan management systems to support their new initiatives. We look forward to working with the company in its new offering to help businesses across the UK spread the cost of their device upgrades with an affordable loan.”