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By: Matt Sifferlen I recently read interesting articles on the Knowledge@Wharton and CNNMoney sites covering the land grab that's taking place among financial services startups that are trying to use a consumer's social media activity and data to make lending decisions. Each of these companies are looking at ways to take the mountains of social media data that sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn generate in order to create new and improved algorithms that will help lenders target potential creditworthy individuals. What are they looking at specifically? Some criteria could be: History of typing in ALL CAPS or all lower case letters Frequent usage of inappropriate comments Number of senior level connections on LinkedIn The quantity of posts containing cats or annoying self-portraits (aka "selfies") Okay, I made that last one up. The point is that these companies are scouring through the data that individuals are creating on social sites and trying to find useful ways to slice and dice it in order to evaluate and target consumers better. On the consumer banking side of the house, there are benefits for tracking down individuals for marketing and collections purposes. A simple search could yield a person's Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profile. The behaviorial information can then be leveraged as a part of more targeted multi-channel and contact strategies. On the commercial banking side, utilizing social site info can help to supplement any traditional underwriting practices. Reviewing the history of a company's reviews on Yelp or Angie's List could share some insight into how a business is perceived and reveal whether there is any meaningful trend in the level of negative feedback being posted or potential growth outlook of the company. There are some challenges involved with leveraging social media data for these purposes. 1. Easily manipulated information 2. Irrelevant information that doesn't represent actual likes, thoughts or relevant behaviors 3. Regulations From a Fraud perspective, most online information can easily and frequently be manipulated which can create a constantly moving target for these providers to monitor and link to the right customer. Fake Facebook and Twitter pages, false connections and referrals on LinkedIn, and fabricated positive online reviews of a business can all be accomplished in a matter of minutes. And commercial fraudsters are likely creating false business social media accounts today for shelf company fraud schemes that they plan on hatching months or years down the road. As B2B review websites continue to make it easier to get customers signed up to use their services, the downside is there will be even more unusable information being created since there are less and less hurdles for commercial fraudsters to clear, particularly for sites that offer their services for free. For now, the larger lenders are more likely to utilize alternative data sources that are third party validated, like rent and utility payment histories, while continuing to rely on tools that can prevent against fraud schemes. It will be interesting to see what new credit and non credit data will be utilized as a common practice in the future as lenders continue their efforts to find more useful data to power their credit and marketing decisions.

According to Experian’s latest State of the Automotive Finance Market report, a record 84.5% of consumers who acquired a new vehicle in Q2 2013 used either a loan or a lease to fund the purchase – up from 82.5% in Q2 2012. Leases accounted for an all-time high of 27.6% of new vehicles financed during the second quarter, up from 24.4% in Q2 2012.

By: Joel Pruis As we go through the economic seasons, we need to remember to reassess our strategy. While we use data as the way to accurately assess the environment and determine the best course of action for your future strategy, the one thing that is for certain is that the current environment will definitely change. Aspects that we did not anticipate will develop, trends may start to slow or change direction. Moneyball continues to be a movie that gives us some great examples. We see that Billy Beane and Peter Brand were constantly looking at their position and making adjustments to the team’s roster. Even before they made any significant adjustments, Beane and Brand found themselves justifying their strategy to the owner (even though the primary issue was with the head coach not playing the roster that maximized the team’s probability of winning). The first aspect that worked against the strategy was the head coach and while we could go down a tangent about cultural battles within an organization, let's focus on how Beane adjusted. Beane simply traded the players the head coach preferred to play forcing the use of players preferred by Beane and Brand. Later we see Beane and Brand making final adjustments to the roster by negotiating trades resulting in the Oakland A’s landing Ricardo Rincon. The change in the league that allowed such a trade was that Rincon’s team was not doing well and the timing allowed the A’s to execute the trade. Beane adjusted with the changes in the league. One thing to note, is that he changed the roster while the team was doing well. They were winning but Beane made adjustments to continue maximizing the team’s potential. Too often we adjust when things are going poorly and do not adjust when we seem to be hitting our targets. Overall, we need to continually assess what has changed in our environment and determine what new challenges or new opportunities these changes present. I encourage you to regularly assess what is happening in your local economy. High-level national trends are constantly on the front page of the news but we need to drill down to see what is happening in a specific market area being served. As Billy Beane did with the Oakland A’s throughout the season, I challenge you to assess your current strategies and execution against what is happening in your market territory. Related posts: How Financial Institutions can assess the overall conditions for generating the net yield on the assets How to create decision strategies for small business lending Upcoming Webinar: Learn about the current state of small business, the economy and how it applies to you
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typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.


