A gastropub restaurant applies for business insurance and is approved. However, social media insights show the restaurant is declining. Even though underwriters usually take a quick look at social media postings, evaluating the trends of the business is not part of the decision process.
When you’re launching a new product, business line, or starting up a business, you’ve got to move fast and break things. This means taking a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, where you’ve got to sacrifice scalability by implementing manual processes to support the early-stage business. Commonly, a manual process will be in place for credit applications and approvals – pulling the credit report, reviewing the data against a scorecard or policy, and then making the decision. Since this likely takes a day — or often longer — the process decreases your customer’s experience, and can hurt your ability to scale and grow revenue the longer you wait to automate.
For credit and risk managers, how effectively you manage your book of business can sometimes be the difference between tirelessly chasing after accounts for collections or proactively growing your portfolio. Though there may be many factors that affect your specific credit risk management process, the underlying goal to reduce and manage your exposure to risk does not change. To help you successfully manage your portfolio, we address 4 common mistakes you need to avoid:
When a new customer wants to establish credit terms with you, the first thing they’re asked to do is fill out your credit application. When you hand over a paper application, did you know you could be negatively impacting your revenue or creating a poor customer experience? Some companies don’t. More than likely, your customer has filled out at least one digital application in the past. The initial perception your application says about your company is that you’re out of step with technology — which may lead them to wonder where else you may be lagging behind. Digital applications provide a simplicity factor, and by not offering one, your credit approval process is perceived to be more difficult, leaving the customer with more work to do —spending extra time writing their information by hand and returning the application — either by email, fax, or in person. Because many companies have already moved to a digital application, your pen-and-paper process sticks out to the customer — and not in a good way. Not to mention, manually processing a paper application takes longer — often much longer — than a digital application. This means customers leave without a credit approval, giving them time to change their mind about their purchase or find a better deal — meaning you just lost a new sale. And even if they still choose to work with you, their relationship with your company starts out with a less-than-amazing customer experience. After the paper application is completed, the workflow process is often time-consuming, error-prone, and cumbersome. The time involved also means that your company waits longer to receive revenue from the sale. By using a manual process, your team spends hours on processing and decisions that could be better spent directly servicing customers or working on other initiatives to grow business. DecisionIQ from Experian automates consistent real-time decisions, streamlining your entire process from applications to onboarding.
For lenders, alternative data can be the factor in edging out your competitors, especially when better decisions are needed to compete for emerging businesses and startups.
Data analysis surrounding lending practices for commercial lenders falls into 4 distinct buckets that define scope, usability, and purpose. In this post we will discuss how they differ in terms of value and complexity.
All business customers are not created equal. Even companies that look solid at first glance can hide festering problems that eventually can impact your bottom line. Successful credit management requires you to carefully evaluate the financial health of every business that asks for credit terms. Here are 5 questions you should be able to answer before extending business credit:
You likely go to great lengths to protect your own identity from fraud and theft. But are you actively protecting your business’s identity as well? Even more importantly, do you make sure you are not doing business with fraudulent companies that have been victims of identity theft themselves?
Scottsdale, Ariz., May 22, 2018 — Experian®, at its 37th annual Vision Conference, today announced it has become a certified vendor of the Small Business Financial Exchange, Inc. (SBFE), a nonprofit trade association that gathers and aggregates small-business payment data in the United States to help organizations build a complete picture of small business.
Today Experian Business Information Services releases the Experian/Moody's Analytics Main Street Report for Q1 2018. The report brings deep insight into the overall financial well-being of the small-business landscape, as well as providing commentary around what certain trends mean for credit grantors and the small-business community.
Your company is dependent on many different people — customers to buy products, employees to provide excellent customer service, and vendors to provide services. However, it can be challenging to have an accurate picture of all aspects of vendor relationships. By having clean and connected vendor data, you can more quickly deploy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.
