Jun 2019 | Credit Decisions

A customer’s credit profile can improve or deteriorate over time

Can you confidently say you know enough about your customer’s personal spending and payment history to accurately identify those likely to continue to have good credit history and safeguard those who may go into financial stress? Accessing more data for greater insight can provide you with a multi-dimensional view of an individual’s credit profile. Trended Data can not only help reduce your portfolio risk but also improve your collections strategies and allow you to make fairer and more responsible lending decisions.

Greater data and insight make for a better decisioning process

Having access to more granular data on an individual’s spend and payment history allows you to more accurately differentiate customers who have similar risk scores but very different recent credit behaviour.  This greater differentiation not only enables improved risk management in lending decisions but also allows for more tailored product offerings to meet the needs of the applicant.

By taking a view over time through the use of Trended Data, you have the ability to better predict potential financial stress or appropriately reward customers who have an improving credit trend that may not yet be apparent from their score.

Figure showing Trended Data scoring

Responsible lending can help to reduce your business debt and collections risk

Periodically reviewing the depth and breadth of data used to build views of the customer is vital to ensuring the most accurate and fair decisioning for your customers, particularly when consumer appetite and credit products evolve.

Inaccurate decisions made by businesses can lead to individuals taking on more debt than they can manage and subsequently suffer from financial stress, resulting in collection and bad debt issues for your business and well as a negative customer experience and brand image.

Trended Data enables you to make better informed decisions, offer more appropriate products and services to help mitigate risk. Customers with good credit behaviour can be identified which in turn creates a greater opportunity to offer them a broader selection of products and services.  This not only helps you to be a more responsible lender, but to also greatly improve the business opportunity to sell a broader portfolio of products or services.

Trended Data can help you grow your lending capabilities

As data experts, at Experian we know that having a greater visibility of relevant data is valuable in the decisioning process, which is why our Trended Data, allows you to access not only our historical bureau data which spans 6 years. It allows you to dig deeper to better understand your customer and have a fairer, more rounded view on their credit profile, especially those with a thin file. The automated decisioning products we can offer allows for a quicker process and gives you a fuller picture for more inclusive lending.