How Peabody built confidence in CDD

Peabody, one of the UK’s largest not-for-profit Housing Associations, has been providing safe, secure homes for over 160 years. With more than 100,000 homes across London and the home counties, their mission to help people in need of decent housing is central to everything they do, including their Client Due Diligence (CDD) process.

We spoke to Kayleigh Gordon, Head of Sales Operations, and Kamille Rodgers, Sales Operations Manager, to explore how partnering with Thirdfort as part of the Peabody New Homes team has transformed their CDD from a disjointed, manual task list into a straightforward, efficient operation, significantly cutting the time it takes to onboard customers.

How does their process work?

Peabody New Homes Sales Team needed to build a new, more efficient process for completing CDD. The team wanted something which slotted nicely into the process and could make it simple for their customers to do crucial financial and identification checks needed when buying a new home.

When a new customer has secured a reservation on a new property, a straightforward process is followed:

1. Seamless invite: The team sends a secure invite to the customer and any giftors to complete their ID and Source of Funds checks using the Thirdfort app.

2. Swift completion: The customer completes the checks, with the majority finishing in under 24 hours.

3. Risk-Based review: The team reviews the secure reports, escalating anything higher risk to senior management for further review.

Less back-and-forth 

Before Thirdfort, Peabody’s CDD process was reliant on different manual checks, making it disjointed and often resulting in unnecessary back-and-forth with customers. Gathering crucial evidence, like Source of Funds, was cumbersome, with customers sometimes sending irrelevant or incomplete information via email.

“The majority of checks are clear, so we can progress those customers quickly ultimately delivering a time-efficient service to our end users. Where we spot something high risk, we have a process in place to escalate concerns to the Senior Management team efficiently .” Kayleigh Gordon continues.

By using Thirdfort’s ID verification and Source of Funds together, they can send requests to customers to complete their check in seconds. Whereas before, they found that in some cases irrelevant or incomplete information relating to Source of Funds was being sent via email, they now get everything in one report, including bank statements that have been shared using Open Banking. That cuts a lot of back and forth out, by making it smoother for their customers, as well as the teams creating and reviewing checks.

“We can help our customers with queries on the process, but having Thirdfort’s customer support team there to handle questions on the checks is a great extension of our busy, high performing team.” Kamille Rodgers, Sales Operations Manager. 

Clear oversight of the process 

Using Thirdfort has given the operations team a better oversight of what checks are being done as they have one place for ID verification, proof of address, AML screening, Source of Funds and Know your business reports in one place. The reporting available to them gives them insight into:

• Which checks have been completed.

• What is still outstanding.

• Areas of risk that were previously hidden.

As more teams across Peabody adopt Thirdfort, this centralised oversight will expand, ensuring consistent, high-standard compliance across the entire organisation.

For Kayleigh and Kamille, the difference with Thirdfort is clear. We offer one system that gives them access to all the checks and reporting that they need to run a smooth process for CDD.