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Guest Blog: Future-proofing Your Business with Alternative Data Analytics

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GUEST BLOG

Future-proofing Your Business
with Alternative Data Analytics

  • Ralitsa Boyadzhieva, Marketing Manager at FinScore

Despite the gradual recovery of society from the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to vaccinations, the digital means to make lending transactions are here to stay.  It is safe, efficient, and convenient for both your customers and your lending business. The pandemic has acted as a catalyst for lenders to rapidly adopt digital technologies and stay competitive in this changing environment. Upgrading digital infrastructure introduces fundamental changes that can create more economic opportunities.

However, more digital technologies not only reel in more opportunities but also disadvantages. When it comes to future-proofing your financial services company, aim to grow by expanding your market reach while ensuring profitability by detecting fraudulent individuals who are more likely to default on their loans.

To achieve both, you can rely on alternative data credit scoring.

What is Alternative Credit Scoring?

Alternative data credit scoring is the umbrella term for credit scoring using non-traditional data sources and methods.

In traditional credit scoring, lenders manage their risk and reduction of bad loans by relying on credit bureaus that provide credit information on the consumers. They can learn if the loan applicant has been paying off loans on time, has ongoing loans, or has been blacklisted for not paying at all. But this only works for those who have a loan history. Besides this, they assess the socio-demographic profile of the borrower which can be found on the loan application form either in pen-and-paper or digital form. The lender may also use a credit scorecard, a type of credit model, that outputs a score predicting the probability that the borrower can repay the loan on time. With Alternative Credit Scoring, alternative data sources such as mobile usage, digital wallet usage, bill payment history, social media behavior, geolocation, and more can be aggregated to produce a credit score.

Boosting Your Market Reach by Serving the Unbanked Using a Telco Data Credit Score

The mobile phone has become a physical extension of a 21st-century human. Whatever model, size, or function it may have, each mobile phone owner has a SIM card so he or she can connect with the rest of the world. They use it to make phone calls, send messages, access a wide array of mobile applications — from social media to digital banking. As time passes, a user creates his or her mobile footprint such as, but not limited to, texting usage, data usage, voice usage, top-up patterns, SIM age, and more. These are telco data that is unique to each user. 

Alternative data credit scoring, specifically telco data, can help verify, analyze, and assess the creditworthiness of the credit-invisible applicant. The credit-invisible market, also called the unbanked market, is a portion of the population who does not have any financial history they can leverage if they need to apply for a loan.

In the Philippines, in which our company is headquartered, 70% of the population remains unbanked. Telco data credit scoring can be the solution for banks and financial institutions in the Philippines to finally make the invisible market, visible. Not only visible but also reachable and possibly viable for future financially inclusive loan products.

Preventing Fraudulent Accounts by Using Social Media Data Analytics

Now that you have the confidence to serve larger volumes of customers, it is also important to add a fast and powerful way to extend credit to real customers. Fraudulent activities do not sleep. In fact, synthetic identities, bot attacks, and fraud attacks are more present in digital channels.

This is where Social Media Presence Data, which is another type of alternative data analytics, comes in.

Social media presence data is derived from public databases, which are near-real-time data. You can confirm an applicant’s identity with an e-mail address and/or mobile number. FindSocial, a fraud prevention tool, for example, can check more than 20 social media platforms, showing a user avatar and profile information in a simple interface. FindSocial also produces a Social Presence Score that can help you determine whether the customer’s social presence can be trusted or not.

The Future of Lending

Banks and financial institutions of any size are increasingly having positive perceptions towards Alternative Data Credit Scoring because not only can it increase their profitability but also reduce costs due to its speed and efficiency.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further pushed such businesses to transform the way they assess borrowers’ creditworthiness. Besides making their digital banking and/or lending mobile application available to the masses, the lending process, especially loan underwriting and disbursement needs to be fast, easy, and secure to keep up with the demand of the market and to stay ahead of their competitors.

Alternative data scoring provides borrowers with better, easier access to credit. If they apply for a loan from a lender that uses this particular type of credit scoring method, there is a higher probability they will qualify for credit applying for a loan with an establishment relying on traditional methods alone.

Summary

  • Going digital can help financial institutions reach larger markets to serve. However, it can also attract fraudulent individuals.
  • By leveraging alternative data in your analytics efforts, you can reach the large group of unbanked and underbanked individuals and prevent fake accounts from exploiting digital loopholes.
  • Telco data is a type of alternative data that can determine the financial power and creditworthiness of a borrower using data variables such as SMS and call usage, top-up amounts and patterns, SIM age, and more.
  • Social media presence data is a type of alternative data that enables fraud prevention and faster identity reviews.
  • By using an advanced analytics platform, you can instantly confirm if an applicant’s declared e-mail address and mobile number are registered on more than 20 social media platforms.

Learn more on the Marketplace.

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How Instabank is using technology to meet clients wherever they are

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How Instabank is Using Technology
to Meet Clients Wherever They Are

While many businesses have goals, few are moving towards them as successfully as Instabank. In its two years of operation, it has already issued loans totaling over $370 million in Norway and expanded into Finland. Like many other challenger banks, Instabank offers lending products through its website, but the bank has taken their goal of accessible lending one step further with the development of in-store payment solutions.

Their digital-forward approach to lending takes into account that not all purchases are planned and traditional payment methods, such as cash, debit, or credit, are not always the best option for customers.

So, what does this mean for the consumer who’s fallen in love with the couch in the shop window, but wasn’t expecting to make a large purchase?

Instabank provides a simple lending solution that’s available at the point of sale to provide shop customers with instant loan approval. To power the growth of this payment solution Instabank has partnered with a number of key businesses including Eplehuset (a leading retailer for Apple products in Norway) and Power (leading electronics chain across the Nordics), and in-store lending now accounts for a major portion of Instabank’s loan approvals.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why instant loans have yet to become widely accessible, but managing risk and creating the tech solutions needed to provide instant access have played significant roles in the delay. However, these problems didn’t stop Instabank from creating a banking solution that is easy to use, is accessible where and when it’s needed, and enables the smooth flow of payments and services between consumers and businesses.

Building a Digital Bank? – Only with the right talent

So, how do you build a challenger bank that is both ready to handle the complicated risk analytics that has traditionally slowed banks down, while creating banking products that are instantly accessible to consumers?

You hire innovative people to drive the business ahead, such as Instabank’s forward-thinking CTO Farzad Jalily. Farzad and his team are responsible for creating the technology solutions that not only provide a streamlined consumer experience, but are also scalable and adaptable. When asked about creating the architecture that can support Instabank’s business now and grow with them in the future Farzad said,

“I’ve been an architect and an enterprise architect, and you build up a dream architecture. I had all these wishes based on past mistakes and successes. At Instabank I could live out my dream, I could draw out the architecture and cherry-pick solutions and put them together using APIs.”

As a challenger bank, Instabank isn’t weighed down by the legacy systems that often prohibit big banks from innovating and Farzad sees his distributed architecture as a huge advantage over competitors, “All the banks small or big, have problems with their legacy solutions, which we don’t have. We use a micro integration platform instead of having a heavy, established API that you have to use a lot of money to build, so time to market and costs are really low because we use this kind of technology.” Farzad’s idea of using third-party services, which is a unique solution to banking technology needs, can be easily scaled to meet the changing needs of the business as it expands.

Developing a lending solution that greets you at the checkout

Like all other parts of the business, developing lending apps for in-store partner solutions is a fast and easily scalable process for the Instabank team. Their focus is on providing an easy and discrete application experience for customers. To do this they create simple solutions that use Provenir’s sophisticated analytics solution to manage the loan application processes.

Instabank’s partnership with a large furniture retailer in Norway is a great example of this. Instabank has replaced their existing payment solution to create a seamless financing option that can be completed at the point of purchase. Traditional financing options used to pay for large purchases are far from consumer friendly. In many shops, you fall in love with a couch or other big-ticket item that catches your eye, and then fill out pages and pages of paperwork to secure credit. This isn’t just a slow process, it’s cumbersome, archaic, and enough to put many customers off making a purchase.

Have you ever wished that applying for a small loan was as simple as sending a text message to your bank?

Instabank has created that option for the store’s customers.

Shoppers simply have to send a text message, and then answer a few follow up questions to apply for a loan in store. No paperwork, no wasted time, and best of all the application process takes under two minutes. The agreement can even be signed on your mobile phone. It’s an easy, simple, and efficient payment option for consumers. Once approved customers receive a barcode attached to their loan account that can be scanned in-store and topped up for future purchases.

Perhaps the most impressive development created by Farzad’s team is Upgrade—the app that’s powering early phone upgrades and Mac purchases at Norway’s leading retailer of Apple products. Incredibly the team created and launched the app used in store, to calculate the cost of upgrading and finance the purchase, in just 7 weeks.

To complete the valuation of the existing phone and apply for a loan to upgrade, customers simply need to complete a four-question application online. Their identity can be verified using Bank ID, which can then be used to automatically sign the agreement. Again, this easy financing solution takes care of the entire process from valuing the consumer’s current phone to calculating their loan rate.

This focus on meeting customers where they need them shows just how committed Instabank is to their motto ‘we don’t think like a bank we think like you’. Consumers value options and don’t always plan purchases ahead of time, getting an instant loan as part of the checkout process is a simple way of planning for a customer’s needs before they even develop!

Faster decisioning and expanding accessibility—Instabank’s plans for the future

If you’re wondering how Instabank manages to decision an application in just a few minutes, it’s not down to magic or lack of thorough decisioning processes. The decisioning speed is the result of sophisticated risk models combined with a fully automated risk decisioning system that eliminates delays and provides reliable risk answers. However, Instabank still thinks they can be faster!

For many businesses, completing a loan application in under two-minutes is a dream, but not for Instabank, who are currently planning to speed up their decisioning process through the use of microservices. Farzad told us, “If you want to score an applicant you need to run through the whole process, that is old-fashioned. If you can use microservices you can just use the part of the model that you need. In that way, you get an answer even faster.” Switching to this microservices approach will allow Instabank to run an application only through the parts of the process that are necessary to analyze that specific loan application.

Innovation is something that guides and drives Instabank, with future plans including expansion into new products and markets, and an ongoing mission to create the fastest and smartest risk decisioning process possible. And of course, continue to take banking to consumers, wherever they need it!

Considering a microservices architecture for your loan origination app?

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Top FinTech TED Talks That Inspire Us

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Top FinTech TED Talks That Inspire Us

TED Talks are thought provoking, inspirational, and arguably one of the best ways to make your daily commute entertaining. One of the most amazing things about TED Talks is the diversity of topics that speakers discuss, and how their talks are frequently at the forefront of emerging technology.

In our last TED Talks blog post we selected a number of inspiring TED Talks that address the subject of Lending, and how machine learning, alternative data, and technology are changing the way lenders operate and offer their services. This time we’ve binge watched our way through talks that explore the topic of FinTechs and how technology is advancing the world of finances.

When it comes to FinTech, banking, and well, financial services in general it’s easy to get lost in the numbers (pun intended), and forget about the potential impact a business can have on their industry or even the world. Fortunately, TED Talks are available to inspire you to look at the big picture and use technology to create positive change in both financial service accessibility and the impact banking availability can have on an individual.

The following TED Talks focus on the subject of FinTech and cover a range of topics including the influence FinTech is having on the world of financial services, how its improving the payments industry, the ways its improving access to financial services, and perhaps most inspiringly, the positive ways it can change the world.

Here is our recommended viewing list of top TED and TEDx talks to inspire you to innovate and explore the potential of FinTech:

Kids Creating the Future Bank

In the financial services industry, technology has gone from pinch hitter to MVP, but it hasn’t stopped there. In this fascinating TED Talk, author and industry expert Chris Skinner delves into the world of fintechs and why many of the most successful fintechs are founded by ‘kids’—also known as the under-40s—including Revolut, Stripe, and PayTM. Chris explores the cultural and environmental role fintechs will play in the future and how fintech can be used for the greater good to provide protection, improve inclusion, and increase education.

A Revolution in Banking is Coming

When it comes to making life easier for consumers, FinTech is far ahead of many of the traditional banking institutions, but Tom Blomfeld, CEO of UK challenger bank Monzo, thinks the real banking revolution is still to come. In this short, but thought provoking TEDx talk Tom discusses what the future of banking could look like when financial institutions are required to provide easy access to data.

How FinTech Can Positively Impact the World

Spiros Margaris is a world renowned FinTech thought leader, advisor, and venture capitalist. In his TEDx Talk Spiros discusses how FinTech is providing not just a positive influence on the banking industry, but also in the world. For many of us, banking is something that we take for granted, but there are a huge number of individuals who are underbanked or unbanked, such as refugees, recent immigrants, those with poor credit histories, and individuals with thin credit files. Spiros explores how FinTechs can improve the lives of the unbanked and underbanked by providing innovative banking solutions that are accessible and offer a human approach to banking services.

A Vision for Truly Secure and Seamless Transactions

FinTech is evolving the future of payments! Carey Kolaja, who was Vice President of Global Consumer Products at PayPal when she recorded this inspirational TED talk, looks at our current relationship with payment transactions and how technology will drive change in the payments industry. Carey discusses the innovative ways that businesses are using technology to make payments more secure, accessible, and reliable. She also explores the potential uses of this technology in the future, from helping in emergency situations to providing economic opportunities to individuals.

How FinTech is Shaping the Future of Banking

Author, teacher, and Chairman of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong, Henri Arslanian explores how FinTech is revolutionizing the banking industry to create new user friendly financial services. With a digital first approach, FinTech has created new and innovative ways of interacting with existing and potential customers to extend banking services, such as investment advice typically reserved for the wealthy, to everyone. His talk doesn’t just look at the ways finTech will change how consumers access banking, it also explores how it will extend who has access to services. With so much change happening in the banking industry, are the new generation of bankers ready for a digital first banking industry?

Provenir is a risk decisioning platform that puts the power of the decisioning process in the hands of the business. It gives financial services organizations the ability to quickly integrate to data sources through APIs, deploy new risk models, and make risk decisions in seconds. Explore Provenir’s platform to learn how you can use more sophisticated decisioning models to get deeper insights into your consumers and generate decisions in microseconds.

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The Future of Mortgage Origination is not About Mortgages Anymore

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The Future of Mortgage Origination
is not About Mortgages Anymore

Consider this scenario.

Sam has to pick up some checks from a client, but his car is in the shop. So, Sam takes an Uber to the client’s office, gets the checks, scans the checks into a business account using his iPhone, takes another Uber (making a dinner reservation through OpenTable while inside Uber), arrives at the restaurant, sits down to eat, and answers a LinkedIn message while he waits for his food.

Now reverse your clock 15 years.

Absolutely nothing in that story short of “sitting down in a restaurant” or “picking up paper checks from a client” would have been possible.

One of the biggest impacts of technological growth over the past two or three decades is the rise of the “on-demand economy,” which many people seem to believe is only geared towards the young, with their millennial mindset, skinny jeans, and SnapChat filters. In reality, the on-demand economy is growing for all age subsets, which makes perfect sense. If a person is hungry, has a smartphone, and wants food quicker, don’t you think they’d learn to adapt to the current systems?

Real estate disruption, on the other hand, is slow going. While regulations and infrastructure slow the rate of change, many argue it’s coming faster than we think. Some of the major areas being disrupted by Fintech startups are appraisal processes, subletting, and the chance to flip a home.

But now think about mortgages. In many ways, the mortgage defines the American dream — most people don’t have the outright cash to buy their family’s dream home — and because of or in spite of that, it’s one of the more tedious, painstaking processes out there. Talk to 100 people about their mortgage process; chances are, less than 10 were entirely happy with it. Rather, you will hear words like “stressful” or “painful”. Even with great banks and reps, the mortgage approval process can be time-consuming and overwhelming.

That’s poised to change, though.

Rocket Mortgage, now part of Quicken, was one of the first into this space. The seismic shift in mortgages is that an industry dominated for decades by box-checking processes and numbers is now being questioned by concepts like “UX” (User Experience) and rapid response, i.e. the on-demand economy.

The theory works like this: if you can get a car or a pizza in five minutes, why can’t you have an idea of where your mortgage will stand in the same period? “On-demand” has to apply universally, and more generations — not just millennials — believe that now.

How do mortgage origination software process applications so quickly?

Good mortgage origination software integrates with the TransUnion, FICO and other bureaus — then pulls data from public records, bank accounts, and social media profiles, among others, to deliver an initial mortgage context in seconds. In the same way that our Sam’s story wasn’t possible 15 years ago, nor was this. You’d probably wait at least a few hours, if not a week before someone gave you possibilities about your mortgage.

With this progress comes the “UX” mentioned above. Mobile got to scale very quickly — there are more smartphones on Earth than people — and as a result, much UX is mobile-first these days. When you’re on mobile, you’re quite literally on the go. You want a quick, easy, intuitive experience where you don’t need to pull a lot of data from other apps or screens. That ‘now’ mindset carries over regardless of device.

This — this process of designing the simplest, “I will stick with this until the end” method possible — is now how mortgage companies must think of their business. It’s not about 1991 metrics anymore. It’s about how you design the experience for the home buyer, whether they can access it quickly and easily, and what value-add you provide around that (helpful tips to guide them through the home buying process, for example).

Technology has changed everything — even the mortgage underwriting process. So, as a lender, you must realize that the business you’re in now isn’t the same one it has been for generations. Now it’s about experience and speed.

Is Your Digital Mortgage Experience Falling Behind?

Keep up in today’s digital mortgage revolution.

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“Hey, Lenders – Are You Using the Right Data Sources?”

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“Hey, Lenders – Are You Using the Right Data Sources?”

  • Pankaj Jain, Sr. Solution Architect at Provenir

As a digital transformation evangelist with years of experience in the financial and banking industry, I have helped many Fortune 500 clients future-proof their lending programs by providing intelligent solutions, especially in the decision risk management area. Through these engagements, I’ve observed that many lenders compromise their agility in rolling out a decisioning solution due to delays and challenges in the initial steps of evaluating and onboarding the right data sources. Customer needs and expectations are changing in real-time so lenders must eliminate barriers to their own agility to stay in the game. 

Below are few activities I’ve observed that compromise lenders’ agility: 

  • Choosing the Right Data Provider: Considering there are thousands of data providers across many lines of businesses, lenders always have to spend a lot of time choosing the right data provider for their decision strategy. Lenders must evaluate each data provider in each region by the line of business, review their doc specs, figure out ways to test their API in their decision solution, and then, based on the outcome, initiate the onboarding discussion. These activities often significantly delay the implementation of a risk decision solution and ultimately, delay better outcomes for the end customer. 
  • Onboarding Data Providers: Onboarding a data provider involves a series of discussions around pricing, legal contracts, support, etc., and again becomes a bottleneck in the lender’s agility to roll out products to end customers.
  • Switching Data Providers: Considering the effort required to onboard a data provider, lenders often default to their existing data provider and keep using the same data for their new risk decision solution or product. It’s like building a new car with an old engine designed for a different model.  They should put a mechanism in place to easily choose and switch to the data providers that best augment the overall risk decision solution.
  • Keeping Pace Data Sources: As data types are exponentially growing, data providers are offering new data sources, and it is hard for lenders to keep pace with who has what data. Most of the time, lenders default to using the same data type even if there are alternative data products in the market that offer new, more relevant, and deeper insights.

These activities are repeated for each data source and, on average, add a week to a month to making the data available for building a risk decision strategy around it.

To create true agility in launching a risk decisioning platform, lenders need a one-stop hub that offers easy access to a variety of data types so they can evaluate, integrate and easily build decision models around it instead of waiting for months. And having the right data source is as important as having a robust, agile risk decisioning platform.

The Provenir Data Cloud + Provenir Marketplace provides a wide variety of data sources in the lending ecosystem, along with advanced search capability to discover and detect trusted data sources based on geographic location, data type, product type, etc. It’s out of the box, prebuilt API provides seamless integration with available data sources such as credit bureaus, identification and fraud, collateral, alterative credit data, etc. 

The combination of discovering the right data sources and using an out of box prebuilt API allows the lender to quickly switch between different data providers. With a simple click of the button, they can integrate new data sources into their decision strategy seamlessly without having direct contact with the data provider. The lender can test the respective data and enable it for the end customer on the fly once satisfied with the desired test outcome.

Provenir Data Cloud + Marketplace helps lenders be more agile, responding quickly to changing data needs and focusing their time and energy on innovating their financial product. 

Learn how real-time data enhances risk decisioning and wins new customers.

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Dun & Bradstreet’s The Power of Data Podcast featuring Provenir’s Frode Berg

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Dun & Bradstreet’s The Power of Data Podcast
featuring Provenir’s Frode Berg

On this episode of Dun & Bradstreet’s The Power of Data Podcast, Frode Berg, General Manager, EMEA for Provenir shares his insights on data and analytics trends, industry challenges and opportunities for innovation. Frode and host Nick Whitehead explore the:

  • Future of open banking
  • Barriers and benefits of real-time data throughout the customer lifecycle
  • Biggest challenges fintechs and banks are facing in risk decision making
  • Areas where innovation is accelerating in the region

Grab a cup of coffee and listen in on this conversation to pick up some nuggets of new insights.

Ten Companies Using Alternative Data for the Greater Good

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Provenir Founder & CEO Recognized as a Top CEO

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Provenir Founder & CEO Recognized as a Top CEO

Congratulations to Larry Smith, Founder and CEO of Provenir, for being named one of the Top 50 US Financial Technology CEOs for 2021 by The Financial Technology Report. Hundreds of innovators, strategists and corporate leaders applied but only a select few are recognized for their impact on the financial services industry. The companies represented on this year’s award list have developed innovative ways to improve financial processes for consumers and businesses alike.

Learn more about the achievements of Larry and his fellow honorees at The Financial Technology Report. 

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Guest Blog: Layering eIDV Solutions to Reduce Onboarding Friction

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Layering eIDV Solutions
to Reduce Onboarding Friction

  • Tanvi Tapadia, Integrated Marketing Specialist at Global Data Consortium

The identity verification stage of an onboarding flow is one of the biggest sources of attrition. Too much verification activity can be full of friction and frustration for the customer. Too little, and your organization could risk non-compliance. Furthermore, as an organization expands to new global markets, there are new regulations to comply with and thus, new costs to add on.

Companies spent $15 million in non-compliance costs, 2.7 times higher than the cost of compliance. Although attempts have been made at compliance and risk management technology, 79% of compliance costs are still dedicated to personnel. To avoid a technological compliance system from becoming obsolete, investing in a compliant, verification solution could fill the gap between your proactive compliance processes and an airtight, KYC-compliant onboarding funnel.

Find Your Layers

Identity verification comes in many shapes and sizes. From biometric to document to electronic identity verification and more, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

Electronic identity verification (eIDV) is known for giving customers an easy onboarding experience. Its low-friction, fast nature typically makes it the first line of defense for KYC compliance. By utilizing personal information such as name, date of birth, or national ID from various data sources such as mobile carrier databases, judicial registries, utility provider records, consumer and subscription records, and more, you can quickly confirm if an individual is who they claim to be. But what happens if they fail their first attempt at being verified?

The best way to give customers a smooth identity verification experience is to approach your verification solution from all sides.

  1. Finding the verification types that are right for your organization. There are many different types of verification, but we’ll describe a few here.
    • Document verification: will your customers that need verification have or provide sensitive documents? Does your organization have the proper infrastructure to securely handle this type of Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?
    • Biometric verification: does your verification audience have access to the technology or smartphone necessary to take a clear photo of themselves? Do they know how?
    • Two Factor Authentication: one of the simplest identity verification methods is two-factor authentication but still requires access to another piece of technology.
  2. Familiarize yourself with global regulations, or find someone to do it for you.
    • Many compliance costs come from investing in people rather than technology. While compliance officers are absolutely necessary, finding one that is familiar with regulations in every market can be hard.
    • Global Data Consortium utilizes in-country data providers that have extensive knowledge of country-specific regulations. By leveraging authoritative data sources that refresh in real-time, your organization can have high-quality identity, AML- and KYC-compliant data to verify customers instantaneously.  
  3. Evaluate, question, and iterate your current processes.
    • As your organization grows and shifts, it’s important to evaluate costs and the tension between the onboarding experience and thorough compliance. Are your methods of verification still the right ones for your audience? Are they still reaching the right amount of compliance?

Go Out into the World!

Having a compliant business and an enjoyable onboarding experience does not have to be mutually exclusive, and the best way to do both is to layer up! By “waterfalling” each method of verification, you can ensure that your organization is taking reasonable measures to comply with AML and KYC requirements while giving customers the best experience possible.

Learn more on the Marketplace.

Ten Companies Using Alternative Data for the Greater Good

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Guest Blog: Enable fast, frictionless onboarding for differentiated customer experience with Ekata’s Global Identity Engine + Provenir’s Decisioning Cloud

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Enable Fast, Frictionless Onboarding for Differentiated Customer Experience
with Ekata’s Global Identity Engine + Provenir’s Decisioning Cloud

  • Ivan Cloar-Zavaleta, Senior Manager, Strategic Partnerships at Ekata

Last year, COVID-19 triggered a five-year digital quantum leap forward, bringing with it new risks. However, it also brought the rise of a new major differentiator: customer experience. Disruptive technologies continue to be important, especially for the creation of differentiated customer experience, but there is a massive delivery gap. While 80% of business leaders claim they deliver superior customer experience, only 8% of those customers agree. (Source: Bain, Qualtrics)

Ekata has partnered with Provenir to help financial service institutions around the world differentiate their customer experience by offering Ekata’s global dynamic identity verification data for real-time probabilistic risk decisioning in Provenir’s Data Cloud + Provenir Marketplace. Ekata is the one and only global data provider that can validate, link, and see online behavior patterns for these five core identity elements – name, email, phone, address, IP address in unison – around the globe.

Ekata and Provenir joint customers are already reaping benefits from this powerful partnership by:

  • Reducing the time and resources needed for individual custom integrations with a one-stop shop and its ability to add multiple data sources via a secure, simple, drag-and-drop interface.
  • Access in seconds to extensive identity data and risk indicators for passive authentication that enables automated approval processes and reduces customer friction behind the scenes.
  • A fast and seamless platform for testing and integration of global identity data into workflows via a single low-latency API.
  • Streamlining the onboarding experience for the underbanked, a growing sub-segment, who now account for $2B+ in spending but lack traditional credit histories.
  • Detecting synthetic identity fraud through the power of dynamic data linkages and real-time prediction capabilities tracking anomalies in how elements are behaving individually and in combination with others.

Now, any Provenir customer can access the power of the Ekata Identity Engine via the Marketplace. The engines sophisticated data science and machine learning combine the differentiated technologies of two proprietary data sets, the Ekata Identity Graph (housing 1B+ global identities and 7B+ authoritative identity entities to validate, link and provide metadata for all five identity elements) and the Ekata Identity Network (seeing 16B+ identity elements through 6B+ global queries for comprehensive pattern analysis) to produce the unique scores, data attributes, and risk indicators that continuously show up in the top five performers of customers’ risk models and decisioning workflows.

Just confirming the data is valid and belongs to the submitter is not enough, patterns of behavior around these elements surface additional, critical insights. So, while the Identity Graph can tell us a phone number is valid and linked to a given owner, the Identity Network could reveal that that phone has been used with 50 different email addresses in the last 30 days in transactions at over 15 businesses in the global Identity Network—exposing the seemingly valid phone number as potentially risky. Having both datasets is critical to enable a truly comprehensive risk assessment.

The right identity verification data solution enables inclusive and frictionless experiences while, at the same time, ensuring customer privacy, control, and security. Embracing a modern, data-driven approach allows businesses to both stop fraud and provide a good customer experience.

Ekata and Provenir together can provide global businesses the right data and innovative technology to help them deliver on a truly differentiated customer experience for their end customers.

Learn more on the Marketplace.

The Ultimate guide to Decision Engines

What is a decision engine and how does it help your business processes?

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Magic 8 Ball Answers Question: How will Rising Interest Rates Impact the Commercial Real Estate Finance Market?

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Magic 8 Ball Answers Question:
How will Rising Interest Rates Impact the Commercial Real Estate Finance Market?

Many people are familiar with the classic Magic 8 Ball toy that told your fortune or could provide positive, neutral or negative advice on a particular topic.  Having your future predicted was as simple as asking a question and then turning the ball over to read the answer.  If you didn’t like the answer provided (there were only 20 possible answers after all), you could shake or shock the Magic 8 Ball into hopefully providing a more positive outlook.  If only we could use the Magic 8 Ball to predict how the Commercial Real Estate Finance (CREF) market will respond if the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates.

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Concentrate and ask again.

The recent Commercial Real Estate Finance (CREF) Outlook Survey conducted by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) validates that commercial lenders anticipate the demand for new commercial and multifamily mortgages will remain strong in 2016.  On the origination side of the lending coin, MBA anticipates growth in 2016 to reach the to $511 billion mark.

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Outlook good.

Overall, the CREF market performed well in 2015 aided by lower interest rates and higher rates of return on commercial real estate. The economy has grown healthier and inflation has been lower.  But with the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate hike in December 2015 after almost a decade, and the possibility of more hikes to come, will the remainder of 2016 remain as rosy for commercial real estate lending?

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Ask again later.

At the recent MBA CREF/Multifamily Housing Convention & Expo 2016 held last month, MBA experts predicted that the Federal Reserve will in fact raise rates further in 2016 and possibly into 2017.  When rates will rise and by what percentage is not something the Magic 8 Ball can tell us unfortunately.

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Cannot predict now.

Higher interest rates could impact lender cash flows and threaten to devalue assets.  A spike in rates could have a ripple effect for borrowers, increasing commercial mortgage loan rates therefore threatening to shrink the scope of commercial and multifamily property inventory available within budget.   The appetite for new development projects and commercial loan requests may also decline as a result.

Magic 8 Ball answers: Outlook not so good.

Many lending institutions are already suffering from a high degree of manual processing that restricts their ability to respond to market movement and scale up their commercial real estate and mortgage origination business.  Lack of an integrated technology also limits the transparency delivered by unified, automated and flexible financial analysis and risk rating.  Magic 8 Ball answers: Reply hazy try again.

Commercial real estate lenders operating on a single, scalable origination platform today are better prepared to respond to market changes more quickly and efficiently tomorrow.   Savvy lenders with the heightened surveillance capabilities and sound data processing across complex commercial loan origination and multi-asset portfolio management however will be able to predict their own future more accurately than the Magic 8 Ball ever could.

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Signs point to yes.

Is your institution prepared to navigate potential interest rate hikes or will you find yourself looking to the proverbial Magic 8 Ball for answers?

Magic 8 Ball answers:  Don’t limit your lending business growth.

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