Effective marketing strategies for insurance agents and brokers to boost ROI and client engagement.
One of the key questions we often explore is how to maximize the ROI of marketing campaigns and effectively target specific business niches. In this Experian Business Chat, we dive into the challenges that commercial insurance agents and brokers face as they try to launch successful marketing strategies in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Joining me in this discussion are two of Experian’s top experts. Dan Mullooly, our Director of Product Management, manages the strategy and roadmap for the Commercial Insurance Vertical. Accompanying him is Tony Romero, a Senior Product Manager with a rich background in developing our marketing solutions.
Watch Our Business Chat Interview
Experian experts talk about solutions to help insurers jump-start their marketing
In our business chat, Dan introduced the Rapid Growth SMB Bundle, a new offering designed specifically for brokers and agents grappling with outdated marketing tools. This bundle is crafted to rejuvenate their marketing efforts and deliver the results they’re looking for.
Dan shared that the bundle was inspired by common issues within the insurance space, as reported by clients. These challenges include difficulties in executing high-performing marketing campaigns due to inadequate or stale data and a lack of effective data usage and analytics in their campaign strategies.
He pointed out that brokers or agents who incorporate data and analytics into their campaigns see notable success, especially in personalization and targeted marketing, which significantly boosts lead conversion rates. Dan also emphasized the advantages of focusing on existing clients for easier and more profitable upselling, which can be up to twelve times more likely to secure new business from an existing client than from a new prospect.
Dan also explained how the bundle addresses these issues by refining audience targeting, enhancing message reception, and identifying the optimal risks for clients’ specific needs. He highlighted the importance of a multi-channel marketing approach, integrating direct mail with digital strategies like email campaigns to improve reach and conversion rates.
Tony then took over to detail the three tiers of the Rapid Growth SMB Bundle—Essentials, Intermediate, and Advanced. Each tier is designed to cater to different levels of client sophistication and marketing needs, from enriching lead data to advanced analytics and segmentation.
Tony also outlined the unique aspects of Experian’s offerings, including our comprehensive data capabilities that provide a 360-degree view of prospects, our superior small business database, and the rapid deployment of tailored marketing strategies.
” We can help by really helping to hone in on some of those audiences you’re truly after, to make sure that your messaging is well received, and also make sure that we’re identifying the best risks for your particular appetite.”
Dan Mullooly, Dir. Product Management
Experian
If the Rapid Growth SMB Bundle sounds like something that could benefit your business, I encourage you to contact your Experian Commercial Insurance Account Executive to start tailoring a strategy that fits your needs.
What follows below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:
Gary Stockton: Hello everyone and welcome to Business Chat. Today’s conversation focuses on challenges faced by commercial agents and brokers to quickly deploy successful marketing strategies as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Are you challenged to maximize the ROI of your current marketing campaigns? Is it difficult for you to target business niches based on granular demographics? I’m joined by two of our experts. Dan Mallooly is the Director of Product Management who manages our strategy and roadmap for the Commercial Insurance Vertical. Dan is joined by Tony Romero, a senior product manager with Experian, who has an extensive background in developing our marketing solutions.
Gentlemen, welcome.
Gary Stockton: Dan and Tony, we just introduced a new bundle offering called Rapid Growth SMB Bundle. Who do we have in mind when we made the decision to bundle a set of solutions?
Dan Mullooly: So the primary audience we’re trying to help here are brokers and agents who have been using outdated solutions that are no longer getting them to the results they want. So, we really tried to cater this bundled offering to that particular audience.
Gary Stockton: Can you talk about what we see in the insurance space that led us to create the bundle?
Dan Mullooly: The clients that we’ve spoken with have expressed a few common challenges across the board. One of them is being able to execute high-performing marketing campaigns. And they’ve expressed some issues with things like not having enough data or, I should say, inadequate data. Also, the data that they have might become stale. So, they might not be reaching out to the right contact information that they once had for a particular customer.
The other thing that we hear is that there’s a lack of data and analytics within the process of running their marketing campaigns. So, they don’t have a good understanding of whether or not a campaign is working or not working. And so we really try to help them with understanding through our solutions, help them understand how they could overcome some of these challenges and get a better return of a better ROI from some of the solutions we can help to offer.
Gary Stockton: So, what market insights are you following related to the space’s winners and how they use data and analytics?
Dan Mullooly: First and foremost, I’d say those brokers or agents who embrace data and analytics within their campaigns to do things like further personalization or target specific segments. We see a sense of success, which typically leads to a significant increase in lead conversion rates for these campaigns.
We also see opportunities for some of our customers to look at the existing book that they have before they go out and try to prospect for new businesses and really look inside that book and say, Hey, where can I have a meaningful impact on some of the customers I already have? It’s well known that selling to an existing customer is much easier than selling to a new prospect.
From some of the analyses we’ve seen, we see that this trend could be anywhere from three to twelve times more likely to win over new business from an existing client than from a prospect. So, our solutions are geared to help with some of these key insights and trends that we’re seeing in the marketplace. Tony will talk about those in a little bit.
Gary Stockton: Can you describe some of the problems clients face that are being addressed with these bundled solutions?
Dan Mullooly: There’s a lot of competition in the market, first and foremost. We see many of our clients trying to capture the same audiences. They’re trying to go after those good risks. On the backend, we see areas where there’s just not enough differentiation within their marketing efforts. We can help by really helping to hone in on some of those audiences you’re truly after, to make sure that your messaging is well received, and also make sure that we’re identifying the best risks for your particular appetite.
Second, we see agents and brokers who are just using traditional methods, which are not having the profound impact that they might have once had within the industry. We see things like just using direct mailers, and really, you have to go beyond just doing that; it’s not enough for today’s landscape.
So, there are additive ways that we can help with solutions, such as combining your direct mail with maybe an email campaign. When you do this, you’re trying to have multiple touchpoints with customers that you’re targeting.
And then lastly is just really helping to enable more of a digital strategy for marketing efforts. Again, going back to the direct mail, if you’re just going the direct mail route and you don’t have a digital strategy, you will have a difficult time reaching the audiences and having better conversion rates.
What’s the takeaway from here? Consistently delivering your messages across multiple channels will help you in 2024 and beyond as the marketing landscape evolves.
Gary Stockton: Tony, tell me more about the new Rapid Growth SMB bundle for insurance.
Tony Romero: When Dan came to me with the needs and concerns of the carriers, agents and brokers, we sat down and collaborated on a very focused bundle. And these options were designed to effectively maximize our client’s marketing budget across their customer life cycle or across their levels of sophistication. Overall, we have a very comprehensive marketing toolkit. But we want it to be very focused. And so, we defined essential options, intermediate and advanced.
Gary Stockton: What does each of the options include? Can you go into a further detail?
Tony Romero: Yes. Before I do, I just wanted to mention that we view ourselves as marketing advisors, trusted consultants who help identify the right marketing strategy for our clients. What’s the right data to be used? What are the right services to be utilized? What’s the timing?
So all of that comes together to help our clients truly maximize their campaigns. So, with these options, we have the essential package, which, as Dan mentioned, is focused on existing client bases. So, our clients who want to upsell or cross sell to their existing customer base, this is the right package here, and it includes our lead list, which includes over 17 million verified business records with contacts. As Dan mentioned, some of our clients have stale data. First and foremost, you want to be able to make sure that data is correct and current. So our lead list can help to ensure that we’re filling in the gaps where any data is missing or to fix stale or incorrect data.
Secondly, we have our consumer-to-business linkage capability, which is where our clients can look at their consumer customer base and identify individuals who are also involved with a business and be able to promote business products to those individuals who have businesses. Lastly, to Dan’s point, we can provide email capabilities to provide a multi-channel marketing approach.
This includes not only providing business emails and or consumer emails, but we can also act as an agency where we’re helping to develop creative. We can deploy an email campaign. We can track the level of engagement and conversions on emails. So, we can provide the full gamut in order to create those multi touch points.
Now, along with this, we can provide analytic services. This is for both the essential and the intermediate packages. So we can start by doing simple profiling or segmentation, which is identifying certain key attributes on which you might want to focus a marketing campaign.
So that could be certain industries. It could be geo-location. It could be the company size or revenue, whatever elements you want to add to a profile, and we can do that to identify the right prospects to go market to. Secondly, we can also do what’s called a lookalike analysis, which is another step further. With lookalike analysis, you’re looking at your existing customer base. You identify who are the ideal customers. What are their attributes? Why did they convert? Being able to use those levels of attributes to identify a marketing or prospect list that has similar attributes to be promoted certainly leads to higher conversion rates.
Next is the intermediate option, and that’s now where a client may focus instead of focusing on marketing towards their existing client base, now they want to look outside the four walls or out to the open market and doing more of a true prospecting. And so here’s where the intermediate package plays in.
We provide on top of the essential package, we provide, lead enrichment. We can provide data hygiene to ensure that all of the data that we’re prospecting to is the most current and accurate. In addition, we also can provide an omni-channel marketing approach. And this is where instead of having a disjointed direct mail and a disjointed email, marketing campaign, we really combine this now into more of a unified marketing campaign where you’re making sure that the timing, the messaging, the call to action is unified between a direct mail piece, email and or social media altogether combined and tracking the, the conversions and the engagement rates to make sure that you can learn from it for the next round of marketing.
And lastly, we have our advanced option. The advanced option now brings in a higher level of a data-driven set of strategies. For example, we can do higher levels of segmentation, we can do prescreen and prequalification campaigns that either use just commercial data alone or commercial and consumer data together to provide a blended prescreen prequal approach. We also have Diversity and Equity Indicators to identify minority-led businesses or women-led businesses. So that’s another element we can provide. On the analytics side, our commercial data scientist team can provide very predictive response models that can provide yet another level of targeting for marketing campaigns.
Gary Stockton: So what’s unique about the Experian offering?
Tony Romero: Yeah, I’d say the way to frame this is that the depth, breadth, and accuracy of our data is unique to what we can offer here. First, I’ll say that the best way to say this is a 360 view of our prospects. We can use demographic, firmographic, and risk data all together to hone in on who the right prospects are to go after and suppress the businesses that have high risk or don’t fit the right profile. So, there’s a lot that we can do to do with segmenting there. Also, I’ll say we have a superior small business database. Our capability to identify micro businesses may not have a file at all or it’s a thin file. We can still identify that, these, opportunities or prospects are worth marketing to.
And, it goes beyond what most other vendors have capability to do.We also provide affordable and rapid deployment with a very data-driven refinement of our solutions. For example, once we’ve defined a strategy, we can deploy it within five business days. The way I like to describe our capability is again as a consultant to make it easy for our clients to define what their strategies need to be, to define what their campaigns need to look like and to measure the results of those campaigns then.
Gary Stockton: It sounds like the suite of solutions you’ve put here, and the options you’ve given to agents and brokers will get them a lot faster.
Dan Mullooly: Absolutely.
Tony Romero: Yeah, couldn’t agree more. Ease of use, being able to do rapid deployment, we’re here to help. And again, we can tailor our solutions accordingly for every client.
Gary Stockton: Excellent stuff. Dan, Tony, thanks so much for coming on Business Chat. You’ve given us a lot to think about. If the Rapid Growth SMB Bundle sounds like something that you would like to explore, please reach out to your Experian Commercial Insurance Account Executive to start a conversation. Thanks for watching everyone.
Small businesses have been opening at record rates during and following the pandemic. With so many new businesses seeking capital, and not all of them borrowing with good intentions, Experian thought it would be a good time to talk about mitigating fraud with one of the leading FinTech lenders. Ryan Rosett is the Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly, and he shares several valuable insights with us in this Business Chat. Watch Our Business Chat Interview What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview. Gary Stockton: Hello, and thanks for joining us for this business chat. I'm Gary Stockton from Experian Business Information Services, and I'm here with our Vice President, Dominic DiGiuseppe, and also Ryan Rosett, the founder of Credibly, a fintech dedicated to helping medium and small-size businesses grow via funding decisions that are based on the holistic health and potential of a business.And we're here today to discuss fraud as it relates to FinTech in the small business space. Gentlemen, welcome to Business Chat. So Experian has recently released some interesting new statistics on the impact of fraud across several industries, notably that over 39% of recent FinTech inquiries were rated as high risk by our commercial first-party fraud score.And that's a predictive score that can predict the likelihood of first-party payment default and the credit bust-out scenarios that we see. These inquiries are projected to carry 62% of all first-party fraud risk within the population. And if you would like to see more on that analysis, we'll be including a link in the blog post for this business chat.So Dominic, I wanted to get your reaction to this statistic, given our mission to serve small businesses and considering small businesses make up the greater part of our economy and economic output.Dominic DeGuiseppe: Yeah, Gary, thanks for that. First and foremost, I want to give a shout-out to our data sciences and product teams for being able to continue to innovate in this space.But really, when you look at post-pandemic, the amount of businesses that have been created, it's, we were somewhat surprised by the numbers as well. But the amount of businesses that are being created, the mission that we have an experience making sure that we can help provide capital and we can provide funding and get that into the hands of business owners quickly.So if we take a look at some of the trends here, the amount of businesses that are being formed since the pandemic is pretty surprising. We've continued to see that trend. Rise and stabilize a bit, but it's still much higher than pre-pandemic levels. So when you think about businesses that are looking to understand the type of fraud that's being perpetrated or making sure that these types of businesses are actually legitimate as they're looking to make credit decisions and provide these companies with lending or funding decisions, these are the types of tools that have been that the team has been creating. Rapid new business formation during pandemic To make sure that we're assessing and helping folks determine the levels of risk that are associated with these businesses. I know we've talked about this in the past, a few times in different conversations, but can you tell the folks tuning in here a little bit about the Credibly origin story I find it super unique and interesting.Ryan Rosett: Oh, absolutely. So my partner and I started the business in 2010. If you think about 2010, it was a contrarian time to start a business. It was coming out of, the Great Recession of 2008/2009, and they were always talking about this double-dip recession, but it was actually an opportune time to start just because small businesses were really looking for access to credit.And what we are is that we're a cash flow lender. So, we look at the cash flow and make decisions and determinations in a very quick manner to provide working capital at an affordable rate for the customer. So that means, it's important to us that the business can sustain the payments that we're providing, and we can maximize the amount of money working capital that we can give them.So it's just something that we're focused on, and we've had the wind in our back for a, I would say, eight years. And then there's something called the pandemic hit, which was like, which, I didn't sleep for, I don't know, four months. But it was a period of time that was really like an interesting time for a small business lender, but then recognizing also that the government money really boosted up the small businesses, and it worked well for alternative lenders like ourselves.Gary Stockton: The pandemic did accelerate rapid digitization, and it does seem like an opportunity for FinTechs to address lending for small businesses digitally. This stat that we were talking about, it's really quite astounding that there were that number of businesses that sprung up during the pandemic.It makes a lot of sense, though, when you consider there were quite a lot of people that were transitioning from maybe a different industry into another industry, home businesses springing up. But with so many new businesses coming online and the impact of cybercrime on small businesses, Dominic, how do lenders know whether or not they are dealing with a real business when they onboard new customers digitally?Dominic DeGuiseppe: Yeah, I think that's certainly a challenge. And I think one of the things that we're looking to answer is, really, three things — is the business real? Is the business active? And is the applicant that's applying for the loan or the type of funding are they actually linked to the business?I think we can certainly answer for that, but I think, since we've got one of the top FinTechs in the space out there, Ryan what is Credibly doing to understand different fraud trends and combat what's happening within the space with fraud?Ryan Rosett: What I can say is that fraud is pervasive right now. And, as we're an online lender, we make decisions in under four hours from app to decision and fund same day. The amount of data alternative data that we're pulling in to make decisions is really quick. And so the risk that there's a fraud application coming through is something that we that you know, I'd say that's largely what we work on.I would say the three largest fraud patterns that we're seeing and you addressed earlier, was an application mismatch. Which is against the verified sources that they listed. And then, we also have just altered documentation associated with the bank statements.And again, that would be something that would be illegal historically, but we're a nonbank lender. And we're just trying to make decisions based on the data that we have. And we want to verify that the applicant is the owner of the business. So those are the types of frauds that we're seeing, I'd say, like a high level and then there are certain things that we do to combat that.So we will call it stipulations to fund. So we may offer to make an offer subject to them supplying additional information. Maybe it's the articles of a corporation. Maybe it's a tax return. And oftentimes, it's not to say whether you're profitable or not profitable, we're looking at who's the owner, who's getting K1s on the tax returns?Those are examples of things that we are looking at. And I know Experian has been an excellent partner of ours in terms of matching and using a number of different data sources that you provide.Dominic DeGuiseppe: How have you seen fraud evolve pre-pandemic to post-pandemic and continue to take shape and take a different shape, from what's been happening as to now?Ryan Rosett: Yeah, that's a good question. So on a pre-pandemic basis today, we're back to the same level of losses. Okay. But the fraud is becoming a little bit more advanced. Okay. Whether it's be it through cyber attacks, whether it's online applications, there's a number of different things that we're working on that we're constantly combating. So it's not it's not something that we put a fix in and then we move away. It's something that we're constantly evaluating, whether it's a submitting partner, or whether we have an affiliate that provides a certain number of lead applications.Those are things that we're constantly measuring to see what the loss rates are, where the fraud is coming from, and then making decisions. So from a pre-pandemic to a post-pandemic, I'd also say that with the PPP, small businesses got a taste of working with alternative lenders through the PPP process, and they became a little bit more comfortable with working with lenders similar to Credibly. So you're seeing like a little bit more comfortability with small businesses having the ability to interface with us and then they're layering in fraud and things of that nature. So it's a constant something we're combating on a daily basis, and it's something that we're thinking about, very often.Dominic DeGuiseppe: Yeah, because when you start to look at it and all the new businesses that are being formed that are coming into the market, working with alternative lenders and FinTech's like yourself, and you guys continuing to shorten the cycle around the app to approval and all the data points that are coming into it. You guys are different than a bank and are able to do those types of things and move quickly. So obviously, with that comes some additional risk; with the FinTech community being tight-knit, how have you been able to benchmark what Credibly is doing against some of the peers that you guys work with in the industry?Ryan Rosett: We have and that's really through public data through asset-backed securitizations; there's reporting relating to the losses that each lender is seeing, of our losses, approximately 10% of our losses we attribute to fraud. The other 90% is, it could be a business that legitimately goes out of business, which happens. So, it's not necessarily fraud. We do benchmark it based on some of our competitors that have asset-backed securitizations and we see the performance in their loss rates and charge costs and things of that nature.Gary Stockton: So, what are you seeing in terms of an amplifying effect on fraud rates with generative AI in the mix and allowing for spoofed content and more access to triangulated private information on business entities?Ryan Rosett: You know, that's a great question. One thing, you're seeing fraudulent IDs. You're seeing IDs that are becoming a little bit more difficult to track and see, because they're creating an identity of someone and they're able to do that through gen AI.So that, that's one aspect. You're also seeing bank statements. We use a number of different bank statements, parsing, and machine learning that looks at these bank statements. It's looking at font type size. There are a number of things when somebody is attributing and oftentimes, sometimes the fraudster is making grave errors also. They're putting data in where data wasn't supposed to be. You're able to detect that really quickly and that's on an automated basis. So that doesn't even touch a human. We see fraud, we kick it out. And, it's declined. So it's a, it's, when we see a, when we fund a fraud application and it's noted as a fraud that we've determined fraud, we then report it we have a, there's a data matching system that we report into so that business owner would never be eligible for. Business financing through an alternative lender. Again,Gary Stockton: Dominic, any closing thoughts?Dominic DeGuiseppe: Yeah, Gary, I would say just in terms of, generally speaking, fraud continues to evolve. There's a number of different things that we're looking at from a business perspective to be able to help our partners. But, Ryan's pointed out a number of those things today, but as FinTechs continue to evolve, fraudsters will continue to evolve and Experian is on our journey to continue to help understand how we can benefit our business partners, making sure that they can combat fraud and keep it out of the business.Gary Stockton: That's great. I think that's a great place to leave today's chat. Dominic, and Ryan, thank you so much for taking time out to share your perspectives on fraud in the commercial space on Business Chat. Thanks for watching, everyone. Related Posts
We’re talking B2B marketing data hygiene with Tony Romero from our product team today on Business Chat.
Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel [Gary]: I'm joined by Yvon Desieux, a Senior Director in our product team, and Yvon is responsible for product strategy and driving innovation in lending through the creation of products and applications for commercial lenders. Sitting next to Yvon is Mike Myers, our Vice President of Product Management here in Business Information, and he leads the product team and AgileWorks Innovation Lab. Welcome to Business Chat, gentlemen. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred a wave of innovation in e-commerce, in restaurant delivery services, in FinTech, digital has raised the stakes. There's an expectation with consumers and businesses that client experiences should be on an even playing field across industries. But when it comes to applying for loans, particularly on the commercial side, those processes can be quite manual. One of the things that speed things along is real-time, financial statement data. What is real-time financial statement data? [Yvon]: Well, simply, financial statement data in real-time is just when lenders are able to access accounting software via the Internet, to power their lending decisions, and our new product offering Experian Datashare, provides this capability with the power of owner permission data. With this permissioning, small business owners are empowered with the ability to leverage their own financial data, to apply for the loans and other services that they need. So, unlike a credit report, permissioning puts the owner in control of what transactional data they share, to qualify for the loans and lines of credit that they need to keep their businesses running. So this consented data provides personalization balanced with privacy for businesses and growth, balanced with accountability for the lenders. What problem is real-time financial statement data solving for lenders? [Yvon]: The feedback that we've received falls into four-tier categories. It's revenue growth creating operational efficiencies, decreasing risk, and creating a better client experience through a modern digital journey that's easy to understand and delivers faster decisions and quicker access to the financing that the small businesses need. Mike, when you talk to clients about digital transformation, what are the things that are keeping them up at night? What are they most concerned with? [Mike]: I think all of our clients, to some degree, are going through a technical transformation, or we often call a path to modernization, and Experian is in the same boat. You know, it's hard to stay on top of technology and really leverage the cloud and be able to get new products, new services, new capabilities to market quickly. Some of the biggest challenges our clients expressed to us are how do we operate in what's become a very different environment over the last year, year, and a half with COVID. Things have moved at a much more rapid pace, as far as digitization. So the interactions with their clients have changed. It's become a bit more impersonal. It's become a bit more quick and with a sense of urgency, and many clients are struggling to do everything online and do it at a breakneck speed. This is often where API's and with different technologies, we can keep pace and help our clients integrate data, access data, and ultimately render decisions to their end-users in a much quicker and more time-efficient way. Can you talk a little bit about Experian's API Hub and getting access to our data? [Mike]: The API economy has been here for many years, and our clients are integrating our data and, you know, putting it into their systems so their users can access data real-time. And Datashare is one of those services where this data can be integrated into our client's systems. And there's no drop-off, there's no manual, or swivel chair type activity where you're going to multiple systems. It becomes a much more efficient process. And not only the client wins, but also an applicant gets a much more rapid decision and can go ahead and power their business. Can financial statement data play a role in helping emerging and underserved businesses grow? If so, how? [Yvon]: Yeah, for new and small businesses that haven't yet established business credit and rely on the owner's personal credit profile for lending decisions, Datashare gives them the ability to share their financial statements and show the financial health of the business. This expanded data can be used, in the decision-making process in addition to the standard bureau data to create more approvals. By permissioning data, these businesses are able to move out of an unscorable or subprime, hard money loan bracket, into a space that helps them qualify for more traditional loans and lines of credit, with better rates in terms. [Gary]: Mike, I've got another slide here; businesses of color, have been severely impacted by COVID. You can see some of these stats here. 30% of black business owners say that access to credit is the biggest challenge in the next 12 months. 47% said they didn't apply for financing because they did not think they would be approved, only 37% received all of the financing they sought. Recently on a CBA webinar with a Experian, Janelle Williams from the Atlanta Fed was saying that 83% of the PPP loans went to white-owned businesses, but only 1.9% went to businesses of color. How can Experian DataShare help underserved businesses of color? [Mike]: Yeah, Gary, you're really touching on a key point here. You know, small businesses, power our economy. They make up the majority of businesses out there. And based on that recent stat you and Yvon just discussed about new business startups. There's more than ever, and we all have to do a better job of making sure there's an equal playing field when it comes to accessing capital, whether it's trade credit or financial packages, to help them manage their cash flow. And that became more evident than ever again, with the pandemic and the sudden shift in the economy. It became more and more challenging for many small businesses to manage their cash flow, pay their employees, and really see a path forward. So data share is exciting in a number of ways. What excites me is that it now combines a historical process that was done in a much more offline manual way. And now can be done in real-time. And if you start combining that with historical payment information, historical public record filings, in addition to real-time financials, you have a winning combination that can provide a clear view of a small business's financial status and real-time view. So not only the historical, which is a great way to predict future payment behavior, but also the most current accounts receivable accounts payable information that can really help you understand what their future holds. How can DataShare deepen the relationships between lenders and the small businesses that they serve? [Yvon]: Datashare drives operational efficiency. So, it allows the lenders to receive the financial statement data in a standardized format. This is regardless of the size of the business or the source of the accounting data. It drastically reduces the level of manual effort required to underwrite a loan. And it automates much of the time spent on the administrative tasks associated with the lending process. So this means that relationship managers and underwriters and credit teams are going to spend less time creating reports and gathering documents and chasing clients. And they're going to be able to spend more time holding, we hope, value-driven conversations to deepen the relationships they have with their clients and help those businesses grow and expand in line with their needs. [Gary]: So those small businesses are going to experience greater efficiency, ease of doing business with their lender. The lender has more time to devote and work more closely with those clients, but also maybe the underserved businesses, the unscored businesses, they have that additional insight to see really how that business is doing and how they can grow that relationship with them. Am I right? [Yvon]: Yeah, absolutely. Time is the big commodity, and speed kills. So what Datashare allows lenders to do is negate all of the wasted time and effort spent onboarding and processing clients. And they can dig into that live transactional data, and get to understand the business, and perhaps share insights with the business owners that even the owners don't know. So, it allows both sides to work more efficiently and more profitably. [Gary]: Are you seeing a change in perception on the part of the business owners of today? I mean, a lot of the Millennial business owners they're used to mobile technology, they're used to delivery services on-demand services. Do you see a change in perception in permissioning, access to financial statement data? [Yvon]: Yeah, actually, we have. We typically see adoption rates as high as 90% when it comes to small businesses that are actively looking for financing. So these are motivated clients who typically go with a lender that can provide the quickest time to cash, and Datashare typically cuts down that time to about 65%. We live in a rapidly developing world where digital adoption is at an all-time high, and the same is true for small businesses. As we shift from the stacks of paper and filing cabinets, both lenders and borrowers see the benefits of leveraging technology to make their organizations more efficient and profitable. The annual review process is one pain point that we've heard a lot from clients. Is this something that could help clients minimize some of that pressure, that's a real stressor on bandwidth? [Yvon]: Yeah, absolutely. Datashare automates the monthly, quarterly, or annual review process. So when a small business permissions their data, lenders are able to choose the data refresh frequency, that is also permissioned. So, combined with covenant monitoring Datashare is able to flag accounts that fall out of an agreed risk threshold, which saves the credit team valuable time having to review their entire book of business and allows them to strategically focus on problem accounts and mitigate risk before it gets out of hand. [Gary]: So, any further thoughts on how Experian DataShare can help lenders or the small businesses they serve? [Yvon]: Yeah. Our focus will continue to be on finding ways to automate processes and provide insights into the financial statement data that we acquire. We'll continue to receive feedback from the clients that we've partnered with and integrate that into our roadmap to create new products and services that will benefit both lenders and the borrowers that they serve. [Mike]: Yeah. I would add Gary that we're at a really interesting time. You know, there's the speed and the in-depth view of a small business's financials at our client's fingertips that can help equal that playing field and open up financial opportunities for businesses of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and Experian Datashare helps with that. Combine that with our historical trade and public record data, and you've got a winning solution for both our clients who are offering the financial vehicles, as well as the applicants, the small businesses out there that need help. And that historically may have been on the outside looking in. Now they have an opportunity to share their financial situation, a picture that can help them move their business forward and access capital when they most need it. [Gary]: Well, this has been super informative, guys. I want to thank you for taking the time to come on Business Chat. And if you would like to learn more about how real-time financial statement data can help small businesses, Experian recently published a free ebook perspective paper. We'll provide a link and a QR code for you to download. If you have any questions, of course, feel free to reach out to your Experian account representative to get a conversation started about helping small businesses grow through innovative solutions like Experian DataShare. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Download Perspective Paper Learn more about alternative data Related Posts
