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The Benefits and Risks of Emojis in Payments ‎😃🤫🧐

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The Benefits and Risks of Emojis in Payments ‎😃🤫🧐

You and a friend are heading to the cinema, but your friend finds that he doesn’t have enough cash for the ticket and forgot his wallet. You pay for his ticket, which he promises to pay you back for in a few days.

Two weeks later and your friend still hasn’t paid you back. What now?

It’s a bit awkward to suddenly turn your friendship into a loan servicer-debtor situation. Many people would want to avoid turning their relationship sour by essentially engaging in straightforward collections with a friend. (ie., “Hey, about that money you owe me…”). Sending a friendly picture to jolt their memory and allow them to pay you instantly turns a potentially awkward situation into a fun social interaction.

It’s a bit awkward to suddenly turn your friendship into a loan servicer-debtor situation. Many people would want to avoid turning their relationship sour by essentially engaging in straightforward collections with a friend. (ie., “Hey, about that money you owe me…”). Sending a friendly picture to jolt their memory and allow them to pay you instantly turns a potentially awkward situation into a fun social interaction.

Companies like Zelle, Square, Venmo, and Facebook have all earned popularity based on the use of emojis in the transaction experience. For example, Venmo reports that its average user checks it two or three times per week, often just to see what their friends are up to.

While emojis have rapidly gained steam in recent years as a quirky shortcut and supplement to texting on smartphones, they’ve now become ubiquitous across nearly every communications platform.

Now emojis are also found in frequent business use in industries including marketing, advertising, content in films and on apps, and even as part of website URLs.

Why Platforms Benefit From Emojis ????

What makes emojis transformative and value adding for businesses is two-fold:

First, emojis are essentially a modern hieroglyphic. Emojis allow ideas, messages, and feelings to be conveyed through a representative and easily understood picture. Especially for commonly used phrases or types of communication, such as acknowledgments or reminders, they allow people to engage in time saving shorthand that skips what otherwise might be needless repetition.

Second, emojis humanize and can greatly add to our communications. By supplementing, or even replacing, mere text with additional faces, expressions, and symbols, emojis allow our messages to build a more complete picture of the ideas, thoughts, and feelings involved.

It is only fitting that they’ve now have begun to be used for distinct user interface functions in the payments industry.

Emoji-based payment transactions are not only useful for individuals seeking to increase collections efficiency from covering for their friends after a night out, but also can be useful for business-to-consumer and B2B purposes as well.

For businesses that want to increase user interest in their payment platform or service, emojis are certainly one way to do it.

By providing users with a sleek and modern user interface system, businesses may be able to better facilitate user understanding of their payment products and obligations, as well as increase interest, use, and volume in user-to-user, business-to-user, and B2B transactions.

Emoji Risks

However, emojis certainly come with risks as well.

1. There is no “universal emoji language” or set of common emoji definitions, which makes miscommunication a worry. Also, the lack of standardization might create internal complications for payment providers seeking to translate emoji-information across their accounting and risk-management systems.

With more emojis being created by the day, undoubtedly the communications entanglement may eventually become problematic despite the growing business opportunity.

2. Furthermore, emojis also have not been universally adopted. While many people, ranging from Millennials to baby boomers, greatly enjoy using emojis, not everyone is onboard with this trend. Perhaps as time goes on even more users will adopt emojis, but at the moment many users may still favor a platform or service not exclusively oriented around them.

Nonetheless, emojis are a rapidly growing social trend that looks to have sticking power. Businesses across a variety of industries are already integrating emojis into their platforms and seeing significant boosts in activity and revenue.

With the payments industry a natural fit for emoji-use, undoubtedly we shall see more payments services exploring how to use emojis to boost their customer lists, user activity, transactions volume, and payments efficiency.

3 Unique Opportunities for Payments in the Sharing Economy

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Living in the Mortgage Underwriting Process

Written by Allison Karavos on . Posted in Blog.

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Living in the Mortgage Underwriting Process

  • Matthew Wilde

I have been selling risk analytics and decisioning solutions for years now. I know the value proposition, and fully believe in it, because I speak with financial institutions who share their mortgage-related challenges with me every day. These are incredibly smart people that I get to speak with, innovating in their organisations to make decisioning and underwriting processes more precise, more intelligent, and progressively faster. What I didn’t know, until now, is how difficult it is to live through the mortgage origination process from the customer’s shoes. Since I’ve recently lived it, I have to share my story to corroborate the pain that all of my prospects are sharing — now from a slightly different perspective.

Mortgage in Principle: My Experience

Very recently, I worked with a mortgage broker to kick off the mortgage pre-approval process. My information was submitted to over ninety financial institutions. Now, with a particular interest in this business I was curious to see how communication would be handled and what the response times would be. After all, I’m speaking with these organisations every day and they are all telling me that they are bent on making this exact process more customer-centric, simpler, faster. The first mortgage in principle came back within fifteen minutes, and the remainder trickled in over the following forty-eight hours.

This is the part of the story where emotion plays its part. That is to say, when I was waiting for the pre-approvals to come in there was a new, unfamiliar part of my brain that jumped in the co-pilot seat. My logical brain went along its daily business while our new co-pilot counted through the list of things that were going to go wrong, and how that would rob us of all our hopes and dreams. That co-pilot made forty-eight hours feel like weeks, and was a huge advocate for that first pre-approval. ‘Fifteen minutes! They must really have their operation together; their customer service is going to be fantastic. If those other guys take twenty-four hours for pre-approval, I don’t even want to know what the underwriting process is going to be like.’ I suspect I’m not an anomaly here.

Also, read: Credit Underwriting Process

Receiving a decision in principle is only one step in the process – albeit, often the simplest – and I know my ‘after it’s all said and done’ recap is not going to be 100% sunshine and rainbows, nor should it be. Small doses of fear sharpen our senses in times when outcomes are heavy, and our decisions have consequence. Home buying is a big deal, and borrowing hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend on a house is not supposed to be as light-hearted as ordering a take-out. But, why shouldn’t it be as positive?

Mortgages: Heading in the Right Direction

I have my hopes high for the remainder of the process. After all, I’ve seen first-hand the positive steps that financial institutions are taking toward better, more customer-centric lending processes. Some are a bit slower than others (I know we’re not ordering take-out, but if you’re twenty-four hours behind your competitors, we have some work to do). I’m happy to be part of the solution, and look forward to sharing part two of this story so we can continue improving together.

Is Your Digital Mortgage Experience Falling Behind?

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How Data Drives the Financing Shift in Telco

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How Data Drives the Financing Shift in Telco

As competition grows fiercer and products become commoditized, customers are placing more demands on their carriers. Forward thinking telco organizations are relying on advanced data and analytics to differentiate and hone their advantage.

This eight-page white paper presents data-driven insights and use cases to help you:

  • Dig into your credit risk data to improve finance offerings
  • Illuminate customer experience trends to reduce churn
  • Leverage alternative data to capture a broader market

“Provenir empowers the Telia Finance team to create and change credit offerings independently, process customer applications in seconds, and easily integrate into multiple data sources for better quality decisioning.”

Fredrik Nilsson, Telia Finance

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Digital Loan Origination: Capturing Customers’ Hearts (And Wallets)

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Digital Loan Origination:
Capturing Customers’ Hearts
(And Wallets)

Challenge the Lending Status Quo

A wave of technologically savvy, specialized, and customer centric challengers are out to disrupt the banking value chain. These contenders, often dubbed Challenger Banks, are new, agile, and they are capturing hearts in a space that is marked by consumer cynicism.

Download this white paper to see why Challenger Banks are outscoring traditional banks when it comes to reputation and trust. We will explore the segment’s approach to digital loan origination from the following perspectives:

  • Product
  • Service
  • Customer Proposition

“Our entire approach is built on simplifying banking. One of the ways we do this is by making the customer experience fast and effortless; from the initial onboarding process through to every subsequent Interaction.”

Robert Berg, CEO, Instabank

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Tackling digitization in financial services? Add these inspiring books to your reading list

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Tackling digitization in financial services?
Add these inspiring books to your reading list

Whether your organization is just starting out on a digital journey, you’re an expert on digitization in financial services, or anywhere in-between, learning from leaders in the industry can help inspire you to think about things differently!

At Provenir, I spend my time working with a huge range of people, from those who work in organizations exploring their digital options, to employees of what can only be described as digital disruptors, and one thing is clear: Digitization isn’t a one size fits all situation. Learning something new every day from these amazingly creative and talented people has inspired me to expand my reading list this year and delve into some additional perspectives.

And, I thought I’d share the first 5 books on my list with you! These books, covering everything from data analytics to the banks of the future, are a great resource for anyone in the financial industry:

The Model Thinker | Provenir

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

Data has the power to transform your risk decisioning processes, so this fascinating book, The Model Thinker, from social scientist Scott E. Page is at the top of my reading list. When it comes to making credit decisions in today’s digital world you need to gain a much deeper understanding of what the data is trying to tell you, “anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren’t enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk.”

The Model Thinker covers linear regression, random walks, and many other models, but perhaps the most fascinating method discussed is the ‘many-model paradigm.’ This “shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs.”

A fantastic option for anyone in financial services, providing a practical toolkit to teach business users, scientists, analysts, writers, and more, how to leverage data to make more informed decisions.

Emotional Banking

Emotional Banking: Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech, and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands

As one of the leading influencers in the FinTech industry Duena Blomstrom needs no introduction and her new book—named after her method and philosophy—Emotional Banking, speaks straight to our human, and tech, hearts. Why? Because at Provenir, we’re huge believers that talent, not just technology, is at the core of creating world class digital experiences.

Anybody working in financial institutions that are looking to leverage technology to drive client interactions will benefit from reading this book. It’s easy to forget, especially in today’s digital-first world that, those emotional connections with customers can be the difference between an average experience and a brand-building moment.

With Emotional Banking, Blomstom promises to explore key questions including, how can banks find their way into customer’s hearts? Is inertia in banking a result of a broken internal culture? What is FinTech and why does it matter?

For those looking for practical advice it concludes with “examples of best practices and a hands-on approach on how to change the inertia, become a brand and make customers fall in love with their bank.”

Breaking Digital Gridlock | Provenir

Breaking Digital Gridlock: Improving Your Bank’s Digital Future by Making Technology Changes Now

Digitization isn’t just limited to large financial institutions, even credit unions and community banks need to take the digital journey.Breaking the Digital Gridlock by John Best aims to help smaller financial institutions “make the shift to digital—even without a seven-figure consulting budget.”

This book piqued my interest for a number of reasons, including its promise to emphasize how organizations can maintain the culture, services, and features valued by their customers while embracing digitization.

With a focus on real-world strategies to take “the leap without tearing your organization apart,” this book should be on your radar if you’re working in a community bank or credit union that is looking to begin their digital journey.

The expert advice shared by industry innovation leader, Best, covers embracing technology at key points in an organization’s evolution, “how FinTech partnerships and strategic technology acquisition can foster new growth with minimal disruption, and how project management can be restructured to most effectively implement any digital solution and how to implement and leverage analytics.”

Digital Human | Provenir

Digital Human: The Fourth Revolution of Humanity Includes Everyone

It’s impossible to ignore a book that sells itself as “a visionary roadmap for the future, a timely guide on how to navigate the world of finance as we create the next generation of humanity.”

Chris Skinner, author of the thefinanser.com, has added another book to his already impressive list with Digital Human. Why is this book on my reading list? Because this all-in approach is something both myself and the Provenir team truly believe in, “Digital is not merely a “bolting on” of technology to produce results faster and cheaper, but a complete rethinking of common business practices and notions of efficiency and customer engagement.”

Watching businesses embrace change is one of the most rewarding aspects of my role, so I’m always interested to gain new perspectives on how financial institutions can leverage technology to drive transformation. Digital Human offers a “timely guide on how to navigate the world of finance as we create the next generation of humanity,” with insights covering: rethinking business models, implementing the right technology, and a roadmap to digital success.

Banking Everywhere, Never a Bank | Provenir

Bank 4.0: Banking Everywhere, Never at a Bank

For someone working in financial services, no reading list would be complete without a book authored by the fantastic Brett King. So here it is: “Bank 4.0 explores the radical transformation already taking place in banking and follows it to its logical conclusion. What will banking look like in 30 years? 50 years?” Isn’t that the question that we’d all like to know the answer to?

Banks are facing an increasingly challenging future and the “coming Bank 4.0 era is one where either your bank is embedded in your world via tech, or it no longer exists.”

The final book in King’s Bank Series explores the future of banking and the role that technology will play in that story. Bank 4.0 promises to help readers identify the low-friction, technology experiences that are undermining existing products and how technology will shape the future of the industry. It also looks into how FinTechs are using psychology, behavior, and technology to disrupt the banking industry. “Bank 4.0 takes you to a world where banking will be instant, smart and ubiquitous, and where you’ll have to adapt faster than ever before just to survive. Welcome to the future.”

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3 Things Telcos Should Know About Alternative Data

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3 Things Telcos Should Know
About Alternative Data

Business models are changing — and rapidly.

Apologies, because you probably knew that.

But it’s happening much faster than we think, whether it is timed to product design shifts or concepts like the Internet of Things, or changed models like servitization. Some have even estimated that a standard enterprise business model changes every 2.5-3 years. The main revenue source may stay the same, but the plan underlying said revenue source shifts essentially every seven quarters.

Primarily a product-driven industry, we see this shift happening in Telco now. As devices become more expensive for an average consumer, telco caters to a built-in audience by way of financing offers. It’s somewhat of a servitization model in its own right: a product (the phone) bolstered by a service (the financing so that you can afford the phone over a period of time).

Financing makes sense as a new revenue stream for telco companies, but it opens up some new challenges too: namely, if you weren’t a lending institution before, how do you make decisions around financing and credit of different consumers? What if they have a non-existent credit history? What then?

Here arrives “alternative data.”

1. What is alternative data?

Don’t worry: it’s not like “alternative facts.”

The easiest definition: information that is not found in the files maintained by the three major credit reporting agencies. For example, some elements not kept in major CRA files include:

  • Telco
  • Utility information
  • Property record information
  • Social media footprints

Alternative data is actually a much bigger slice than you might think. Yes, 190 million Americans have a FICO score, and that’s by far the majority. But consider this: 28 million Americans are credit retired, new to credit, or lost access to credit — and 25 million have no credit bureau record. There’s more, too: while 92% of Americans have a cell phone, only 2.5% of consumer credit bureau files have telco information. It’s the same with utilities: 60% of U.S. residents pay utilities, but just 2.4% of files have this information.

Telco, utility, and lease/property information is often highly indicative of credit trustworthiness but just isn’t tracked at the conventional levels.

2. How do you pull alternative data?

Largely through public record data sources, although you can also search people’s social media profiles.

While social media is not as direct a correlation with credit trustworthiness, it can give you an idea of the person’s activities and habits, especially around check-ins. However, as more and more companies embed with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, et al. concerning immediate purchase (think “Buy Now” buttons), there will be more financial information tied to people’s social media accounts.

This concept is still getting to scale in the U.S., but one of the initial growth areas of alternative data was Indonesia, sometimes considered “the Twitter capital of the world.” There are 78 million active Internet users in Indonesia, with north of 50 million on both Facebook and Twitter. You won’t find that profile information in conventional lending approaches, no; but it’s still highly valuable.

Or is it?

3. Does alternative data work?

Yes. To wit: in one study where auto lenders decided to use alternative data in their decisioning processes, 40% of those rejected via “no-file” and 30% of those rejected via “thin-file” were found to have credit trustworthy scores when you considered these alternative data sources.

Is this a case of “not everyone is on the grid?” Yes, that’s part of it. The other part is that human existence is not stagnant. We’ve done things one way for so long when evaluating credit trustworthiness, but the world has changed dramatically, and we have access to much, much more information. Shouldn’t we be using it to make better decisions?

The Secret to Consumer Lending Success

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Financial Inclusion & Alternative Data in LATAM

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Financial Inclusion & Alternative Data in LATAM

Expert Insights into 2020 Wins & Improvements

Leading experts in the Latin American fintech ecosystem, are joining us to provide their perspectives about one of the most important issues facing the financial industry during these challenging times—financial inclusion and the use of alternative data.

Provenir and CredoLab present the eBook: “Financial Inclusion & Alternative Data in Latam – expert insights into 2020 wins and improvements” to explore:

  • How the fintech industry has transformed during the past year
  • The opportunities 2021 brings in the area of financial inclusion.

Through the expertise of recognized financial experts in the region, the eBook explores how traditional banks and financial companies have readjusted their credit scoring and how they can help power financial and social inclusion.

Read insights from:

Ignacio Carballo, Research Economist, and Director Fintech Ecosystem & Digital Banking at UCA

Marcel Van Oost, Financial Advisor and Fintech Startup Founder with the collaboration of Marcial Gonzalez Fraga, Fintech Investor

Clementina Giraldo, Dots & Tech CEO & Founder

Bruno Diniz, Fintech Advisor, Managing Partner at Spiralem and Book Author: “The Fintech phenomenon”

Sebastián Olivera, Montevideo Fintech Forum Founder and WeFintech Co-Founder, the Iberoamerican
Women Network

Read the full insights:

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Spanish
Portuguese

Ten Companies Using Alternative Data for the Greater Good

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Credit Where It’s Due – Stand-Out Financial Services Initiatives of 2020

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Credit Where It’s Due –
Stand-Out Financial Services Initiatives of 2020

Hark, what’s that sound???

No, it’s not angels singing, it’s the world breathing a collective sigh of relief that 2020 finally has one foot out of the door!

It’s been an unpredictable year. The Covid pandemic fundamentally changed the way we go about our daily lives, from where we work, how we shop, and how we interact with people, to how we manage our money. Many if not all industries have taken a hit, and financial services are no exception.

In what felt like an overnight shift, cash became dirty, bank branches were made off limits, and financial hardship became a reality for many previously stable businesses and families. As an industry that exists to serve customers with the products that best meet their needs, the ‘customer-centric’ mantra of many hit its first major test…

The result? Some failed, some passed, an elite few shone.

It’s those shining examples that I want to focus on today to bring 2020 to a close. Let’s give kudos to the financial services organizations whose efforts helped support families and businesses throughout the year. The resiliency, creativity, and adaptability of the teams at these incredible companies helped keep the world turning with human-centric digital-first banking experiences:

  • Starling Bank – Starling lent £1.4bn to over 40,000 UK businesses through the government-backed BBLS and CBILS funds. They moved quickly; getting accredited on 7th May and lending on 11th May. Their Coronavirus Support Hub has also been widely praised by business owners. At the start of the pandemic, Starling recognized the logistical challenges that self-isolating customers could face earlier than others and quickly launched their Connected Card – a second debit card that personal account customers could give to a trusted friend or family member to buy groceries and essential goods on their behalf. At a similar time, they also launched their virtual Never Home Alone program, to help staff and their families adjust to being at home, providing a support hub of physical and mental health tips and shared experiences.
  • Chime – US-based mobile bank, Chime, piloted a way for its users to receive their federal $1,200 stimulus checks instantly. They recently closed fundraising that valued the company at $14.5bn, making it the most valuable American fintech start-up serving retail customers. Chime has more than tripled it’s revenue and transaction volumes in the last year from customers pivoting to mobile banking services. A key differentiator lies with their checking accounts that give access to paychecks two days early and allow free use of an overdraft facility. This flexibility has resonated with customers throughout the pandemic, who are increasingly choosing to shift their primary banking accounts to Chime.
  • Ualá – Argentinian digital start-up bank Ualá launched three years ago. Their mission: to disrupt the LATAM banking space and address the challenge of financial inclusion in a region where only 54% of the adult population have a bank account and cash is still king. That balance is now shifting, and with demand for digital money services booming in recent months, Ualá’s financially inclusive customer onboarding has helped grow its user base of distributed cards to 2 million. Following growth in Argentina and a total $200m raise, Ualá recently announced an expansion to Mexico, staking their intention to be the next Latin American unicorn and lead a revolution that will change the way people see and understand their personal finances.
  • Admiral insurance – Back in April, at the outset of the UK national lockdown, car and van journeys ground to a halt and Admiral Insurance took the decision to rebate £25 to each customer through its Stay at Home refund policy in recognition of reduced claims—the only UK insurer to do so. This cost the firm £110m, but resulted in an increased retention rate of 81%, up from 68% last year – saving acquisition costs for over half a million customers. Large savings were experienced across the insurance sector and the firm hit the headlines in the summer when, as a thank you for their hard work throughout the pandemic, departing Chief Executive David Stevens gifted a £10m bonus windfall to Admiral’s 10,000 staff.
  • BBVA – BBVA moved quickly to offer special assistance to consumer and small business customers impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, including ATM fee refunds, payment deferrals, extensions and waivers on existing loans and lines of credit, and many other offers. They also set up a $35m Covid-19 relief fund to boost the global response to the virus’s initial hit. The fund helped medical centers and hospitals around the globe through the purchase of medical equipment and supplies. In compliance with local health authorities, the fund has helped distribute 2,400 ventilators, 25,000 items of PPE, and nearly a million face masks to 265 hospitals across the BBVA footprint, with a portion of the fund allocated to helping older people and vulnerable families.
  • DBS Singapore – In response to the spread of Covid-19, DBS Singapore introduced a range of support measures and financial assistance to affected customers, including complimentary insurance coverage and home-loan-payment relief for employees in affected industries. SMEs were supported with a six-month property-loan deferment, temporary loan bridging, an extension of import facilities, digital account opening, and next-day, collateral-free business loans. The bank also launched health and education-related tools, such as online doctor consultation, online video-based lessons for kids, and taxi street-hail contact tracing. These services were tremendously popular and their free Covid-19 hospital cash insurance policy, for example, recorded more than 52,000 sign-ups a day at its peak.
  • Kuda – Nigeria’s digital-only bank, Kuda, is pioneering a new breed of financial institutions in the country! Nigeria has seen the use of digital banking services increase throughout 2020 with Kuda tripling the number of daily customers onboarded. This has led to a recent $10m seed fundraise, tipped as the largest of its kind in Africa. Kuda also launched a Covid-19 fund to help buy and distribute food and other essentials to people badly affected by the economic impacts of the pandemic in Lagos. Launched in April, the fund received an initial contribution of 500,000 naira from Kuda before being opened to the general public.
  • Covid Credit – 11:FS, Credit Kudos, Fronted
    It started with a single tweet on a Saturday morning back in March from Simon Taylor at 11:FS. The UK government had announced furlough support measures for full-time workers, but there appeared to be little plans in place for the 5m self-employed workforce to access these funds. A big piece of the puzzle was missing, and Simon quickly coordinated response from over 35 individuals from the fintech community, including Credit Kudos and Fronted, who together built an open banking journey, self-certification process, data capture, and ID verification – wrapped up as Covid Credit. Within 48hrs a functioning service was set up ready to present to the government and made available to the whole UK self-employed community. Truly inspiring. You can read the full story here.

The events of 2020 and the impact of the pandemic have been far-reaching, for the financial services industry it has provided the impetus needed to fast-track the transition from offline to online. The acceleration to serve and support customers in a digital way is a theme that is here to stay and set to continue. Businesses are racing to embrace digital transformation and the innovative teams behind these companies are finding incredible ways to use technology to power their human-centric, digital banking experiences.

The Provenir team and I would like to say a huge thank you to the people who’ve worked the extra hours and gone the extra mile to help keep the world turning throughout 2020.

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Enhancing Collections Strategies with Predictive Analytics

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Enhancing Collections Strategies
with Predictive Analytics

It’s just over 30 years since The Simpsons first aired. The show built a reputation on predicting the future; Presidencies, Super Bowl wins, mobile phone technology, Olympic feats… even accurately depicting London skyscrapers, almost 20 years before construction. In a world where truth can often be stranger than fiction, these moments have manifested themselves into real-life. Rather than complex data-driven insight, it was the astute cultural awareness of Matt Groening et al that formed the basis of these ‘predictions’. A keen eye and razor-sharp interpretation of social nuances, cultural insight, and intuition to look at things with a wide lens to determine predictive outcomes.

The world has undoubtedly changed in recent months. In today’s challenging landscape, banks and financial organisations are aware that it’s now as important as ever to make fast and well-informed credit decisions for onboarding new customers; largely driven by increased competition and a rise in customer demands for fully digital processes. But, in a time of economic instability, where financial stress is being experienced by a growing number of households, proactively managing existing customers as effectively as possible is a high priority for lenders; enhancing collections strategies through data insight and predictive analytics is now essential to this process.

Today’s reality is that an increasing number of customers have become, or are becoming exposed, with a reduced or uncertain-level of income and a recent history of payment holidays across multiple products. A recent study from Transunion highlights that 53% of UK consumer household income has been impacted, with 68% now concerned with how they are going to pay current bills and loans. When asked which bills are most concerning, credit cards (37%), mortgages (24%), personal loans (22%), and car payments (18%) rank high. These concerns are undoubtedly being shared by an ever-growing number of global households.

The industry is facing challenges and change. The existing customer-base is concerned about meeting repayments, and many are faced with reduced income or redundancy in higher impacted sectors like hospitality, travel, and engineering. Adaptation is now required from both borrowers and lenders to ensure the best outcomes are achieved through the collections process. Lenders need to be equipped to handle increased volumes of cases and mitigate losses, all while building strong relationships with customers who need their proactive support. We recently launched our latest eBook where we outlined some of the key ways predictive analytics, supported by technology, can combat the increasing challenges faced by collections teams. Through early-warning triggers, predictive models, ML solutions that deliver default rate predictions, and wide-ranging real-time data sources, lenders can access advanced capability when it comes to predicting delinquencies and deploying multi-channel customer communication strategies. Banks and lenders can no longer rely on credit bureaus alone to inform their collection strategies or time-delayed manual assessments to identify higher-risk customers.

Supported by technology, here are my top three actionable methods that businesses can adopt to increase their ability to predict and enhance their collections strategies:

  1. Proactively predict delinquencies: Actively monitor accounts for early-warning triggers that could signal impending trouble, such as increasing credit line usage, changing payment behaviour, change in income, and decreasing credit scores. Deploy predictive models to determine which combination of factors often lead to customers entering the collections process. Using batch, real-time, or hybrid processing methods, risk can be identified early by using predictive risk scores and teams can work with customers to ensure the best outcomes.
  2. Optimize payment/settlement offers: Empowering your team to make the right offer at the right time is an essential part of every collection’s strategy. Agents need to be able to see and analyse all data – from all accounts that have previously defaulted across the portfolio. Analytics tools can rapidly gather and assess this data to predict the optimal offer. Predictive analytics can help agents understand what percentage of debt is normally recovered in similar cases and set the benchmark for likely repayment amounts that can be achieved – supporting lower write-offs and protecting loan loss reserves.
  3. Optimize contact strategies: To create brand-defining customer experiences, collections teams need to adopt sophisticated and cohesive collections strategies powered by insight. All relevant data and information that informs the best contact method needs to be in one place and easily accessible. This will allow analytics models to be implemented easily, taking into account all documented customer interactions. In a time when customers are choosing which debts to prioritize, creating a brand experience through the tried-and-tested channels (phone, text, email, in-app), can improve engagement, willingness to pay, and customer retention.

We are now in a place where instantly accessible and accurate predictions are now achievable for lenders. With diverse, rich data sources and powerful technology to provide the razor-sharp interpretation of data and insights, lenders can widen the lens on the collections process to maximize the best outcomes for all customers; from Springfield US to Sheffield UK.

How to Take Your Collections Team From Hero To SuperHero

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Employee Spotlight – Kerry Cleary

Written by Allison Karavos on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on Employee Spotlight – Kerry Cleary

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Employee Spotlight – Kerry Cleary

Welcome to the team Kerry! You’ve recently joined Provenir as Head of Data Partnerships… can you tell us a bit about your background and your role?

My background is in Fraud and Risk; working with market leading companies, including time spent at a leading UK credit reference agency. I have experience working with partners to create and maintain successful business relationships within the industry and across multiple sectors.

We have some hugely exciting product initiatives being undertaken across the business, being delivered by a talented team. Innovation is part of Provenir’s DNA and we have an unrivaled track record of integrating hundreds of traditional and new data sources for global clients. As Head of Data Partnerships, I am leading an exciting and unique new initiative that will bring these data providers together and make it easier to access rich data sources within a single tool… watch this space!

What does a typical day look like for you?

A typical day involves exploring and researching the market and building relationships with key industry and market leading global data partners who will play a huge part in the success of this new initiative. I’m working very closely with different teams across the business; from sales and marketing to the development teams, to ensure we are all aligned and working as successfully as possible.

What three words would you use to describe your role?

Exciting: Being part of a company and team that are talented, successful, and passionate about what they do, really brings excitement to the role.
Rewarding: The hard work that is involved in our new and exciting product initiative is beginning to show exciting results. It is very rewarding seeing this dedication paying off and forming the foundations of what is certain to be a global, industry-leading product!
Challenging: Who doesn’t love a challenge! My role as Head of Data Partnerships is a new role here at Provenir and is a fantastic new challenge for me. No day is the same with new and exciting challenges to tackle on a regular basis.

What’s your favorite part of your job so far?

Being new to Provenir, I would say my favorite part of my job so far is getting to know the business and talented teams and exploring how we all work together from all corners of the globe. Working as part of one big team creates a positive work environment and the support received from everyone is amazing!

If you could choose anyone, who would you pick as your mentor?

Whilst I could choose many mentors, a close friend of mine has always been a fantastic mentor for me and has provided support and guidance to me for many years. I strive to live by her example of hard work, passion, kindness, and enthusiasm for life and success.

What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?

‘You are responsible for your own success and happiness’

What are the most exciting developments/opportunities you’re seeing in the industry?

As part of my role, I spend a lot of time researching the market and looking for ways Provenir can support our customers and continue to provide the best-in-class customer experience. How data is accessed and used can have a significant impact on our clients and their business strategies. Making that rich and diverse data easily accessible is the driving force behind innovation here at Provenir.

What’s your most memorable facepalm moment!?

I’ll keep that one to myself for now ha ha!

What is your biggest achievement to date – personal or professional?

Professionally – I have worked very hard over the years to build a successful career and I am very proud of where I am today.
Personally – My biggest achievement by far in life is being a Mum to my Daughter Mary! I could not be prouder of the job I am doing in raising a happy, healthy, and clever little girl!

Connect with Kerry on Linkedin here

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