How Equifax is Helping Credit Lenders “Leap Frog” the Competition

on November 4, 2016

Digital Disruption + Risk Management

Digital Disruption is at the top of every banking and insurance CEO’s agenda in 2017: how to become the disrupter and avoid getting disrupted. Across all credit-driven financial services firms, the pressure is intense with new market players emerging in all realms creating new expectations from customers.

Credit Risk Management and Decisioning are emerging as key scenarios that are ripe opportunities for digital disruption for two primary reasons.
First, the impact of credit risk decision management and compliance is significant to the bottom line and incremental improvements to processes are no longer enabling lenders and insurers to keep pace.
McKinsey reports that, “In 2012, the share of risk and compliance in total banking costs was about 10 percent; in the coming year the cost is expected to rise to around 15 percent… banks are finding it increasingly difficult to mitigate risk…To expand despite the new pressures, banks need to digitize their credit processes.” Top performing firms not only need to eliminate inconsistent approaches to credit analysis that expose them to unnecessary risk. To leap frog, they need to develop a systematic approach based on the integration of new data sources and credit-scoring approaches rather than relying solely on the historical performance indicators.

Second, risk management is, by its very nature, a data-driven discipline well positioned to take advantage of the massive advancements in analytics technologies at the new levels of scale enabled by cloud computing. This is dramatically lowering the cost of all solutions related to credit risk management for small to mid-sized financial services institutions, including FinTech startups that can enter the market quickly with limited barriers to entry.

What is the Opportunity in 2017?

Banks and Insurers can manage increasingly complex data under a higher volume of business rules. At the same time, they can apply an agile management framework of rules and data to take advantage of market opportunities in real-time. This is now possible at a fraction of the cost and time to implement compared to even five years ago. Our partnership with firms like Equifax is paving the way for the next wave of digital disruption in the financial services industry in scenarios like credit risk management and fraud detection.

The Equifax Story

Equifax has offered their leading, cloud-based decision management solution called InterConnect to their global customers for many years. The InterConnect solution “automates account opening, credit-risk decisioning, cross-selling and fraud mitigation during the account acquisition process.”

In 2016, Equifax was looking for ways to help their customers capture new opportunities in their credit risk management and decisioning process by strengthening one of the core components of their InterConnect platform: the Rules Editor.

Equifax’s customers were looking for enhanced support in defining, testing and optimizing business rules. Even more importantly, they needed to rapidly seize competitive advantage through the agile implementation of new business rules and automated optimization strategies based on real-time results, as well as the development of test data for repeated use to enable greater consistency and scale.

Equifax turned to Sparkling Logic as a key partner to fulfill these requirements for InterConnect. Sparkling Logic’s decision management engine powers the enhanced Rules Editor. One specific strategy that was not previously possible was the testing and implementation of Champion and Challenger credit decisioning strategies.

Before Sparkling Logic, customers struggled to compare two or more decisioning strategies at the same time. With Challenger and Champion strategies now enabled in the enhanced Rules Editor, new strategies (“Challengers”) can be developed, tested, and deployed simultaneously with existing strategies (“Champions”). Winning strategies are immediately applied to new decisions after the initial test period. Additional revenue is now captured that would have been lost while you waited for one test after another to play out.

What’s Next? How do you replicate this model to leap frog your digital disruption strategy?

While your competitors are busy applying incremental improvements to their portfolio management strategies and using historical performance data to drive crediting decisions, you have the opportunity to leap frog. This is possible when you immediately capture available revenue opportunity by applying an automated decision management engine to your credit decisioning processes.

LEARN HOW from the experts at Equifax and Sparkling Logic directly. RSVP for our Dec. 15th webcast to hear how “How Equifax is Helping Credit Lenders Leap Frog the Competition.” Watch the recording here.

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ABOUT US

Sparkling Logic Inc. is a Silicon Valley-based company dedicated to helping organizations automate and optimize key decisions in daily business operations and customer interactions in a low-code, no-code environment. Our core product, SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager, is an all-in-one decision management platform designed for business analysts to quickly automate and continuously optimize complex operational decisions. Learn more by requesting a live demo or free trial today.