Strategy management

An agile strategy relies on quick and easy access to frequently refreshed quality data. Experian’s customer credit bureau is one way to achieve this. It’s updated monthly with over 750 million records from over 600 of the largest, most well-respected data repositories in the UK. Experian’s Ascend analytics platform uses this updated information to fill any gaps in your customer records.

Determining whether to lend to a customer – and how much they can afford – requires more than just access to the latest data. A tool like PowerCurve Strategy Management gives lenders the tools they need to quickly combine and analyse existing data before extracting the relevant information into insightful, digestible reports. This makes it easy to pin down a strategy based on current priorities and make consistent, informed decisions.

COVID-19 has demonstrated how even the best-laid plans can be rendered useless by major economic shocks. Fortunately, sophisticated templating systems enable you to develop new strategies at speed. Experian’s PowerCurve Strategy Management offers an assisted strategy design tool that helps you refine your policies with simple-to-use drag-and-drop building blocks, all infused with Experian’s expert knowledge and industry best practices.

Trying to formulate, test, adapt and launch new business strategies is hard enough without adding layers of unnecessary complexity. Make sure you choose a platform that enables you to consolidate all your strategic tools in one place, making it easy – and quick – to update your approach to decision-making.

It’s important to fill any gaps in your data with information you can trust – data that’s high quality, compliant and regularly updated. Make sure your chosen information provider does more than simply offer access to a wide range of globally curated data sets – you need a wide range of relevant reference sets, such as location and socio-demographic data, for example, to help complete your customer profiles. Experian’s Aperture Data Studio provides tailored data solutions to meet your needs.

How should you go about analysing and improving the quality of your data? Ideally you need a platform that equips you with a self-service portal and a straightforward means of uploading your datasets. Experian’s Aperture Data Studio is the obvious choice. Once you have the datasets you need, its user-focussed tools make it easy for you to profile, analyse, clean and transform your data. It also lets you set up a scheduled workflow to repeat the process periodically so that your data remains complete, error-free and up to date.

Tools that provide a single customer view (SCV) of your data make it easier to display your data in a consistent manner. A consistent format highlights areas where improvements can be made and enables you to manage individual customers. Aperture Data Studio, for instance, lets you compare records, identify and harmonise duplicates, create a golden nominal and give each individual a unique identification number to provide you with an accurate and up-to-date view of them over time.

Once your data has been cleansed and improved, you’re in a better position to engage your customers with relevant solutions and products. Around 75% of customers say they’d take positive action after experiencing the benefits of single customer view (SCV) tool, which helps to boost engagement, maximise marketing efficiencies and convert investment into profit.

You don’t need mathematical expertise to turn insights from analytical activity into profitable decisions. With the right tools, you can evaluate multiple scenarios, examine the trade-offs and determine which strategy is best – both for you and your customer.

The best way to grow profits is with intelligent pricing and sound revenue-management strategies. This should enable you to tailor your offers to make them more attractive to individual customers, and in turn, improve response and take-up rates.

Keeping the customer at the heart of your decisions can be tricky. A tool like Marketswitch Optimisation can be deployed at any point in the customer lifecycle – from acquisition through to debt management – to help your business evaluate competing goals and priorities while delivering a personalised solution tailored to each customer.

Your business can’t flourish without a robust credit risk strategy. You need the right tools to build an accurate picture of your customers, one you can segment by character traits and behaviour to help both predict future risk and model different growth strategies.

The competitive nature of the lending marketplace means you need to speed up the time taken to evaluate and approve applications. Using a smart tool like Experian’s PowerCurve Customer Acquisition enables you to provide customers with instant, automated approvals 24 hours a day. This results in a smoother, faster experience for your customer and reduces manual processing, potentially cutting costs.

An off-the-shelf lending platform isn’t going to cut it unless its decisioning happens to align with your overall business strategy. What you need is a platform that lets you tailor approvals to suit your business policy. Experian’s Customer Acquisition’s strategy design studio is perfect for this: start with a pre-built template of acceptance rules, then tweak it to build up advanced decisioning journeys that assess individuals against a range of detailed variables.

Don’t rely purely on credit data to power your important decisions. Make sure you benefit from additional insights. Customer Acquisition, for example, integrates with other Experian products and services to provide you with fraud detection and identity checking. It can also link to additional sources of business and consumer data, all of which helps deliver better-quality decisions.

Moving to a new frictionless approvals process shouldn’t be a major undertaking – migrating your lending decisions to the cloud takes just a matter of weeks to complete, and then you’re free to scale your approval needs up and down as required. No fuss, no hassle.