Tag: acquisitions

Despite economic uncertainty, new-customer acquisition remains a high priority in the banking industry, especially with increasing competition from fintech and big tech companies. For traditional banks, standing out in this saturated market doesn’t just involve enhancing their processes — it requires investing in the future of their business: Generation Z. Explore what Gen Z wants from financial technology and how to win them over in 2023 and beyond: Accelerate your digital transformation As digital natives, many Gen Zers prefer interacting with their peers and businesses online. In fact, more than 70% of Gen Zers would consider switching to a financial services provider with better digital offerings and capabilities.1 With a credit prescreen solution that harnesses the power of digital engagement, you can extend and represent firm credit offers through your online and mobile banking platforms, allowing for greater campaign reach and more personalized digital interactions. READ: Case study: Drive loan growth with digital prescreen Streamline your customer onboarding process With 70% of Gen Z and millennials having already opened an account online, it’s imperative that financial institutions offer a digital onboarding experience that’s quick, intuitive, and seamless. However, 44% of Gen Z and millennials state that their digital customer experience has been merely average, noting that the biggest gaps exist in onboarding and account opening.2 To improve the onboarding process, consider leveraging a flexible decisioning platform that accepts applications from multiple channels and automates data collection and identity verification. This way, you can reduce manual activity, drive faster decisions, and provide a frictionless digital customer experience. WATCH: OneAZ Credit Union saw a 25% decrease in manual reviews after implementing an integrated decisioning system Provide educational tools and resources Many Gen Zers feel uncertain and anxious about their financial futures, with their top concern being the cost of living. One way to empower this cohort is by offering credit education tools like step-by-step guides, score simulators, and credit alerts. These resources enable Gen Z to better understand their credit and how certain choices can impact their score. As a result, they can establish healthy financial habits, monitor their progress, and gain more control of their financial lives. By helping Gen Z achieve financial wellness, you can establish trust and long-lasting relationships, ultimately leading to higher customer retention and increased revenue for your business. To learn how Experian can help you engage the next generation of consumers, check out our credit marketing solutions. Learn more 1Addressing banking’s key business challenges in 2023.

Today’s changing economy is directly impacting consumers’ financial behaviors, with some individuals doing well and some showing signs of payment stress. And while these trends may pose challenges to financial institutions, such as how to expand their customer base without taking on additional risk, the right credit attributes can help them drive smarter and more profitable lending decisions. With Experian’s industry-leading credit attributes, organizations can develop precise and explainable acquisition models and strategies. As a result, they can: Expand into new segments: By gaining deeper insights into consumer trends and behaviors, organizations can better assess an individual’s creditworthiness and approve populations who might have been overlooked due to limited or no credit history. Improve the customer experience: Having a wider view of consumer credit behavior and patterns allows organizations to apply the best treatment at the right time based on each consumer’s specific needs. Save time and resources: With an ongoing managed set of base attributes, organizations don’t have to invest significant resources to develop the attributes themselves. Additionally, existing attributes are regularly updated and new attributes are added to keep pace with industry and regulatory changes. Case study: Enhance decision-making and segmentation strategies A large retail credit card issuer was looking to grow their portfolio by identifying and engaging more consumers who met their credit criteria. To do this, they needed to replace their existing custom acquisition model with one that provided a granular view of consumer behavior. By partnering with Experian, the company was able to implement an advanced custom acquisition model powered by our proprietary Trended 3DTM and Premier AttributesSM. Trended 3D analyzes consumers’ behavior patterns over time, while Premier Attributes aggregates and summarizes findings from credit report data, enabling the company to make faster and more strategic lending decisions. Validations of the new model showed up to 10 percent improvement in performance across all segments, helping the company design more effective segmentation strategies, lower their risk exposure and approve more accounts. To learn how Experian can help your organization make the best data-driven decisions, read the full case study or visit us. Download case study Visit us

To drive profitable growth and customer retention in today’s highly competitive landscape, businesses must create long-term value for consumers, starting with their initial engagement. A successful onboarding experience would encourage 46% of consumers1 to increase their investments in a product or service. While many organizations have embraced digital transformation to meet evolving consumer demands, a truly exceptional onboarding experience requires a flexible, data-driven solution that ensures each step of customer acquisition in financial services is as quick, seamless, and cohesive as possible. Otherwise, financial institutions may risk losing potential customers to competitors that can offer a better experience. Here are some of the benefits of implementing a flexible, data-driven decisioning platform: Greater efficiency From processing a consumer’s application to verifying their identity, lenders have historically completed these tasks manually, which can add days, if not weeks, to the onboarding process. Not only does this negatively impact the customer experience, but it also takes resources away from other meaningful work. An agile decisioning platform can automate these tedious tasks and accelerate the customer onboarding process, leading to increased efficiency, improved productivity, and lower acquisition costs2. Reduced fraud and risk Onboarding customers quickly is just as important as ensuring fraudsters are stopped early in the process, especially with the rise of cybercrime. However, only 23% of consumers are very confident that companies are taking steps to secure them online. With a layered digital identity verification solution, financial institutions can validate and verify an applicant’s personal information in real time to identify legitimate customers, mitigate fraud, and pursue growth confidently. Increased acceptance rates Today’s consumers demand instant responses and easy experiences when engaging with businesses, and their expectations around onboarding are no different. Traditional processes that take longer and require heavy documentation, greater amounts of information, and continuous back and forth between parties often result in significant customer dropout. In fact, 40% of digital banking consumers3 abandon opening an account online due to lengthy applications. With a flexible solution powered by real-time data and cutting-edge technology, financial institutions can reduce this friction and drive credit decisions faster, leading to more approvals, improved profitability, and higher customer satisfaction. Having a proper customer onboarding strategy in place is crucial to achieving higher acceptance and retention rates. To learn about how Experian can help you optimize your customer acquisition strategy, visit us and be sure to check out our latest infographic. View infographic Visit us 1 The Manifest, Customer Onboarding Strategy: A Guide to Retain Customers, April 2021. 2 Deloitte, Inside magazine issue 16, 2017. 3 The Financial Brand, How Banks Can Increase Their New Loan Business 100%, 2021.

With 2020 firmly behind us and multiple COVID-19 vaccines being dispersed across the globe, many of us are entering 2021 with a bit of, dare we say it, optimism. But with consumer spending and consumer confidence dipping at the end of the year, along with an inversely proportional spike in coronavirus cases, it’s apparent there’s still some uncertainty to come. This leaves businesses and consumers alike, along with fintechs and their peer financial institutions, wondering when the world’s largest economy will truly rebound.   But based on the most recent numbers available from Experian, fintechs have many reasons to be bullish. In this unprecedented year, marked by a global pandemic and a number of economic and personal challenges for both businesses and consumers, Americans are maintaining healthy credit profiles and responsible spending habits. While growth expectedly slowed towards the end of the year, Q4 of 2020 saw solid job gains in the US labor market, with 883,000 jobs added through November and the US unemployment rate falling to 6.7%. Promisingly, one of the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, the leisure and hospitality industry added back the most jobs of all sectors in October: 271,000. Additionally, US home sales hit a 14-year high fueled by record low mortgage rates. And finally, consumer sentiment rose to the highest level (81.4%) since March 2020. Not only are these promising signs of continued recovery, they illustrate there are ample market opportunities now for fintechs and other financial institutions.   “It’s been encouraging to see many of our fintech partners getting back to their pre-COVID marketing levels,” said Experian Account Executive for Fintech Neil Conway. “Perhaps more promising, these fintechs are telling me that not only are response rates up but so is the credit quality of those applicants,” he said.  More plainly, if your company isn’t in the market now, you’re missing out. Here are the four steps fintechs should take to reenter the lending marketing intelligently, while mitigating as much risk as possible.   Re-do Your Portfolio Review Periodic portfolio reviews are standard practice for financial institutions. But the health crisis has posted unique challenges that necessitate increased focus on the health and performance of your credit portfolio. If you haven’t done so already, doing an analysis of your current lending portfolio is imperative to ensure you are minimizing risk and maximizing profitability. It’s important to understand if your portfolio is overexposed to customers in a particularly hard-hit industry, i.e. entertainment, or bars and restaurants. At the account level there may be opportunities to reevaluate customers based on a different risk appetite or credit criteria and a portfolio review will help identify which of your customers could benefit from second chance opportunities they may not have otherwise been able to receive. Retool Your Data, Analytics and Models As the pandemic has raged on, fintechs have realized many of the traditional data inputs that informed credit models and underwriting may not be giving the complete picture of a consumer. Essentially, a 720 in June 2020 may not mean the same as it does today and forbearance periods have made payment history and delinquency less predictive of future ability to pay. To stay competitive, fintechs must make sure they have access to the freshest, most predictive data. This means adding alternative data and attributes to your data-driven decisioning strategies as much as possible. Alternative data, like income and employment data, works to enhance your ability to see a consumer’s entire credit portfolio, which gives lenders the confidence to continue to lend – as well as the ability to track and monitor a consumer’s historical performance (which is a good indicator of whether or not a consumer has both the intention and ability to repay a loan). Re-Model Your Lending Criteria  One of the many things the global health crisis has affirmed is the ongoing need for the freshest, most predictable data inputs. But even with the right data, analytics can still be tedious, prolonging deployment when time is of the essence. Traditional models are too slow to develop and deploy, and they underperform during sudden economic upheavals. To stay ahead in times recovery or growth, fintechs need high-quality analytics models, running on large and varied data sets that they can deploy quickly and decisively. Unlike many banks and traditional financial institutions, fintechs are positioned to nimbly take advantage of market opportunities. Once your models are performing well, they should be deployed into the market to actualize on credit-worthy current and future borrowers. Advertising/Prescreening for Intentional Acquisition As fintechs look to re-enter the market or ramp up their prescreen volumes to pre-COVID levels, it’s imperative to reach the right prospects, with the right offer, based on where and how they’re browsing. More consumers than ever are relying on their phones for browsing and mobile banking, but aligning messaging and offers across devices and platforms is still important. Here’s where data-driven advertising becomes imperative to create a more relevant experience for consumers, while protecting privacy.   As 2021 rolls forward, there will be ample chance for fintechs to capitalize on new market opportunities. Through up-to-date analysis of your portfolio, ensuring you have the freshest, predictive data, adjusting your lending criteria and tweaking your approach to advertising and prescreen, you can be ready for the opportunities brought on by the economic recovery. How is your fintech gearing up to re-enter the market? Learn more

The largest industry disruptor was a surprise to everyone. Where bets may have been placed on digital transformation, automated decisioning, or better omnichannel programs, no one foresaw the global pandemic of COVID-19 and the corresponding economic fall out that ensued. As financial institutions have spent the past two months scattered and then regrouping, whether with pivoted downturn contingency strategies or with a business-focused Hail Mary, some might argue that the dust is beginning to settle. While the world and the majority of businesses are working to manage and stabilize a new normal against a background of some form of chaos, once federal and state regulations are loosened, the world – and financial institutions in particular – will need a plan forward. So, what comes after COVID-19? With stimulus checks and what everyone hopes will soon be a re-stimulating of the economy, consumers will seek credit. And when that influx comes, there will be a need to strategize what is the right offer for the right consumer. How do you take on more customers while minimizing risk? Non-existent and/or shrinking budgets Many marketing budgets were already small prior to the global pandemic, so coming out of it, to say every marketing dollar counts is an understatement. Traditional prescreen, while a pillar in acquisition operations, is an antiquated strategy. Using hyper-segmentation via a true end-to-end marketing service, pumped up by the right data for decision making, enables financial institutions to not only build the right audience but tailor quality experiences that increase engagement and loyalty. That means ultimately reducing operating costs while improving experiences and take rates. Work from home turned life from home Going virtual has gone viral. Seemingly overnight, most brick and mortar operations went online. Some versions of digital transformation became a need to have, versus a nice to have, and the gap between the financial institutions who were equipped to pivot online, versus those who were not, spread further. As the vast majority of consumers are at home – whether by way of work from home or furlough – our society has quickly embraced everything being online. Reach your consumers where they are, in the digital-first channels to which they have become familiar with and accustomed. As consumers are at the center of every marketing strategy, engaging omnichannel delivery enhances reach across critical touchpoints. Inclusive of social media, email, direct mail, TV, and more, the campaign should provide a seamless experience, all working together in a synchronized fashion. Consistency has always been key, but especially during these volatile times, to reflect stability, empathy and constant messaging is an undertone that can only help strengthen consumers’ view of your organization. Learn fast, grow faster For marketing financial products, it’s a matter of connecting the dots between consumer touchpoints and results data. By making these critical connections, financial institutions will be better positioned to identify the most effective elements in the campaign. By gleaning more insights from campaign performance, organizations can optimize future campaigns and minimize wasted ad spend. These key learnings, delivered at the end of every campaign cycle, help your organization to remain nimble, pivot quickly and execute campaigns that get increasingly better ROI as you hone in on the nuances revealed by data on consumer behavior, preferences, motivations and more. Changing times and even faster-changing needs There’s always been a need for faster decisioning and more results with increasingly fewer resources. The need for speed has been put on hyperdrive as the economy has entered the current environment. How do you keep up with the changing needs of your consumers? Get your marketing right from the start and see results through to the end. Incorporating the right data, advanced analytics and constant access ultimately enable more strategic focus and shorter campaign cycles. As we all navigate the ever-changing “normal,” offering the right support to your consumers is the right thing to do for them and for you. Managing rising consumer needs, while also minimizing risk to your bottom line, is also the right thing to do for your business. Once plans move from managing business operations through the crisis to moving forward, make sure your marketing – how you are reaching out to existing customers and prospective customers for the next steps in their financial journey – is data-driven. To learn more about how Experian can help you execute data-driven marketing that fuels customer acquisition, visit our website. Learn More

The current pandemic will affect the way financial institutions lend and provide credit. Shawn Rife, Experian’s Director of Product Scoring, discusses the ways that financial institutions can navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Check out what he had to say: What implications does the global pandemic have on financial institutions’ analytical needs?  SR: In the customer lifecycle, there are 4 different stages: prospecting, acquisitions, portfolio management, and collections. During times of economic uncertainty, lenders typically take additional actions to ensure that there’s a first line of defense against delinquencies and payment stress. Expanding their focus to incorporate account review/portfolio management becomes particularly important. During this time, clients will be looking for leadership, early warning signs, and ways to recession-proof their portfolios (account management), while growing and maintaining their approvals in a healthy way (originations). Lenders may be well advised to delay any focus on collections, since many consumers may be facing major payment stress through no mismanagement of their own doing. Another critical component is with the rollout of government stimulus packages, which lenders can use to identify people in stress who could benefit for second chance opportunities they may not have otherwise been able to receive. As more consumers seek credit, from an analytics perspective, what considerations should financial institutions be making during this time?  SR: Financial institutions should be assessing and pre-identifying situations that might place consumers in positions of elevated financial stress. That way, organizations can implement solutions to identify and help at-risk consumers before they fall delinquent. The recent Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) – coupled with Experian’s score treatment, are designed to protect consumers against score declines during times of crisis. Furthermore, lenders can provide forbearance and loan deferment programs to help consumers.  For lenders, credit risk scores, models, and attributes are the best ways to identify – and even predict - delinquency risk. The FICO® Resilience Index can also identify consumers who are particularly susceptible to delinquency risk directly due to macroeconomic uncertainty. This gives lenders the opportunity to evaluate their portfolios for loss and connect with consumers who may be in need of further support. What is the smartest next play for financial institutions?  SR: For financial institutions, the smart play is to add alternative data into their data-driven decisioning strategies as much as possible. Alternative data works to enhance your ability to see a consumer’s entire credit portfolio, which gives lenders the confidence to continue to lend – as well as the ability to track and monitor a consumer’s historical performance (which is a good indicator of whether or not a consumer has both the intention and ability to repay a loan). How will the new attribute subset list benefit financial institutions during this time?   SR: Experian’s series of crisis attributes is an example of attributes that can be predictive in times of a crisis. These lists were designed to follow the 3 E’s – Expand, Enhance, and provide Ease of use. Enhance – With these attributes, lenders aren’t limited to traditional data. These attributes allow lenders to look at the entirety of a consumer’s credit or repayment behavior and use more data to make better lending decisions. This becomes crucial in a challenging environment. Expand – This data can also help lenders identify consumers who are in the market for products and services, even if there the lending criteria becomes more stringent. This can open doors and new opportunities for 40-50 million new customers, particularly ones that may not fit initial lending criteria. Ease of Use – Experian has put together the most predictive elements that can identify consumer resilience and potential financial stress in this challenging economy. Experian is committed to helping your organization during times of uncertainty. For more resources, visit our Look Ahead 2020 Hub. Learn more Shawn M. Rife, Director of Risk Scoring, Experian Consumer Information Services, North America Shawn Rife manages Experian’s credit risk scoring models, focused on empowering clients to maximize the scope and influence of their lending universe - while minimizing risk - and complying with ever-changing regulatory standards. Shawn also leads the implementation of Alternative Data within the lending environment, as well as key product implementation initiatives. Prior to Experian, Shawn held key consumer insights and predictive analytics roles for Consumer Packaged Goods and internet companies. Over his career, Shawn has focused on market segmentation, competitive research, new product development and consumer advocacy. He also holds a Master’s degree from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Economics.