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By: Amanda Roth Last week, we discussed how pricing with competition is important to ensure sound decision practices are being implemented in the domains of loan pricing and profitability. The extreme of pricing too high for the market can obviously be detrimental to your organization. The other extreme can be just as dangerous. Pricing for your profitability, regardless of what the competition is charging in your area, has a few potential issues associated with it regarding management of risk. For example, the statistics state you can charge 5 percent in your “A” tier and still be profitable, but the competition is charging 7.5 percent for the same tier. You may be thinking that by offering 5 percent you will attract the “best of the best” to your organization. However, what your statistics may not be showing you is the risk outside of your applicant base. If you significantly change the customers you are bringing in, does your risk increase as well, ultimately increasing the cost associated with each loan? Increased costs will reduce or even eliminate the profitability you had expected. A second potential issue is setting the expectation within the marketplace. It is often understood with the consumers that when changes occur to the interest rate at the federal level, there will be changes at their local financial institution. These changes are often very small. By undercutting your competition by such an extreme amount, your customers may question any attempts to raise rates more than 50bp, if you do experience increased costs as a result of the earlier situation or any other factors. A safer strategy would be to charge between 6.5 percent and 7 percent, which allows you to obtain some of the best customers, ensure stability within the market, and take advantage of additional profitability while it is available. This is definitely a winning strategy for all — and an important consideration as you develop your portfolio risk management objectives.

There was a recent discussion among members of the Anti Fraud experts group on LinkedIn regarding collaboration among financial institutions to combat fraud. Most posters agreed on the benefits of such collaboration but were cynical when it came to anything of substance, such as a shared data network, getting off the ground. I happen to agree with some of the opinions on the primary challenges faced in getting cross industry (or even single industry!) cooperation to prevent both consumer and commercial fraud. Those being: 1) sharing data and 2) return on investment. Despite the challenges, there are some fraud prevention and “negative” file consortium databases available in the market as fraud prevention tools. They’re often used in conjunction with authentication products in an overall risk based authentication / fraud deterrence strategy. Some are focused on the Demand Deposit Account (DDA) market, such as Fidelity’s DebitBureau, while others, like Experian’s own National Fraud Database, address a variety of markets. Early Warning Services has a database of both “account abuse” – aka DDA financial mismanagement – and fraud records. Still others like Ethoca and the UK’s 192.com seem focused on merchant data and online retailers. Regardless of the consortium, they share some common traits. Most: – fall under Fair Credit Reporting Act regulation – are used in the acquisition phase as part of the new account decision – require contribution of data to access the shared data network Given the seemingly general reluctance to participate in fraud consortiums, as evidenced by the group described above, how do we assess value in these consortium databases? Well, for one, most U.S. banks and credit unions participate in and contribute customer behavior data to a consortium. Safe to say, then, that the banking industry has recognized the value of collaboration and sharing data with each other – if not exclusively to minimize fraud losses but at least to manage potential risk at acquisition. I’m speaking here of the DDA financial mismanagement data used under the guiding principle of “past performance predicts future results”. Consortium data that includes confirmed fraud records make the value of collaboration even more clear: a match to one of these records compels further investigation and a more cautious review of the transaction or decision. With this much to gain, why aren’t more companies and industries rushing to join or form a consortium? In my next post, I’ll explore the common objections to joining consortiums and what the future may look like.

As the economic environment changes on what feels like a daily basis, the importance of having information about consumer credit trends and the future direction of credit becomes invaluable for planning and achieving strategic goals. I recently had the opportunity to speak with members of the collections industry about collections strategy and collections change management — and discussed the use of business intelligence data in their industry. I was surprised at how little analysis was conducted in terms of anticipating strategic changes in economic and credit factors that impact the collections business. Mostly, it seems like anecdotal information and media coverage is used to get ‘a feeling’ for the direction of the economy and thus the collections industry. Clearly, there are opportunities to understand these high-level changes in more detail and as a result, I wanted to review some business intelligence capabilities that Experian offers – and to expand on the opportunities I think exist to for collections firms to leverage data and better inform their decisions: * Experian possesses the ability to capture the entire consumer credit perspective, allowing collections firms to understand trends that consider all consumer relationships. * Within each loan type, insights are available by analyzing loan characteristics such as, number of trades, balances, revolving credit limits, trade ages, and delinquency trends. These metrics can help define market sizes, relative delinquency levels and identify segments where accounts are curing faster or more slowly, impacting collectability. * Layering in geographic detail can reveal more granular segment trends, creating segments for both macro and regional-level credit characteristics. * Experian Business Intelligence has visibility to the type of financial institution, allowing for a market by market view of credit patterns and trends. * Risk profiling by VantageScore can shed light on credit score trends, breaking down larger segments into smaller score-based segments and identifying pockets of opportunity and risk. I’ll continue to consider the opportunities for collections firms to leverage business intelligence data in subsequent blogs, where I’ll also discuss the value of credit forecasting to the collections industry.
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