Experian and Moody's Analytics have just released the Q2 2020 Main Street Report. The report brings deep insight into the overall financial well-being of the small-business landscape, as well as offer commentary on business credit trends, and what they mean for lenders and small-businesses.  Small businesses have turned to borrowing to survive periods of prolonged slumping sales, in many cases from government programs offering loan forgiveness. This increased borrowing has masked rising delinquent balances, but such a solution is a short-term fix. To keep their credit current, small businesses will need to find ways to generate revenue. Defaults are expected to rise in coming quarters as forbearance programs expire and as customers are likely to change their priorities in the wake of COVID-19. In Q2, moderate delinquency, defined as 31-90 days past due, rose to 1.66 percent from 1.61 percent, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of increasing delinquency, and the first year-over-year increase since this time last year. The closure of many state and local economies in April and the first half of May left many businesses facing severe revenue shortfalls in the second quarter. This environment has resulted in businesses listing poor sales as the second most important problem facing small businesses, according to the NFIB. If you would like to get the full analysis of the data behind the latest Main Street Report, presented by leading economists from Moody's Analytics and Experian, watch the Quarterly Business Credit Review webinar.

As business delinquencies rise in response to COVID-19, credit departments are becoming increasingly challenged.  In our August 13th Sip and Solve webinar, John Krickus and Andrew Moore will be on hand to share some strategies for maximizing receivables amid rising delinquencies. Managing receivables has never been more important or more challenging. Traditional approaches may no longer apply. In this 15-minute Sip and Solve session, we discuss some solutions for effectively and efficiently handling the increase in receivables many companies are facing. After watching this talk you will learn three key takeaways: Prioritizing receivable management in today's environment Analytic tools for managing receivables Flexing receivables strategies to meet your company's priorities Click to view full slides and transcripts from this session.

In a favorable economic climate, business resilience is often treated as an afterthought. Success is measured in rapid growth and leaps of progress, while failure is little more than a tempering of that expansion. It’s only when things slow down - like during a global pandemic - that companies are forced to take stock of the ground they stand on. As the economy slows to a crawl and entire industries feel the squeeze, business resilience will determine which organizations make it through to the other side. Whether you’re on the supply side or the demand side, chances are your organization is being tested right now. Here are some practical strategies to stay resilient in the time of Covid-19. Gerard Smith, President of Global Risk Management Solutions (GRMS), works with companies who are either on-boarding new suppliers or evaluating current suppliers. When the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains in most industries, many of these companies started scrambling to find replacement suppliers. Finding a reliable supplier is always a challenge, but it’s even more difficult during a global pandemic and economic crisis.     The best practice here is still to vet new suppliers carefully. Smith’s company creates a risk assessment program for Experian clients that analyzes 50 different financial and legal components, including the following: If they’re on the OFAC sanctions list If they’re financially stable If they actually have the certifications they claim to have If they have insurance If they’ve received negative press Many companies fail to do their due diligence when it comes to suppliers, especially if they’re trying to fulfill orders quickly. More often than not, this leads to bigger problems down the line. If you hire a supplier that’s hemorrhaging money, for instance, they may file for bankruptcy right after you pay them for a major shipment. Companies that use GRMS will be notified regularly if a supplier’s financial or legal status changes. If a supplier cancels their insurance coverage, for example, that could indicate financial struggles. Staying abreast of information like this allows businesses to be proactive with suppliers and avoid being blindsided. Make Sure Clients Are Financially Healthy On the flip side of the buyer-supplier relationship, suppliers are now being asked to extend due dates. Deciding how to comply with these requests can be tricky. Most want to be understanding and reasonable, but there is often legitimate concern over whether they’ll receive payment. Brodie Oldham, Senior Director of Analytic Consultancy for Experian, said Experian offers several services for suppliers who need to gauge how reliable their customers are in this moment. Experian has a special Covid-19 risk index that suppliers can overlay on top of existing credit models. This tool can help determine whether or not a client is in an unstable financial position. If the company operates in a highly impacted part of the country or industry, the supplier can use that information to change the terms. For example, they can sell fewer items to minimize the risk of an unpaid invoice. Experian also monitors credit utilization for business credit cards and other lines of credit. If a company’s credit utilization surpasses a certain threshold, they can alert the supplier who can halt future shipments until the utilization decreases. Find Faster Ways to Evaluate Creditworthiness Many suppliers depend on a company’s credit information to determine its reliability as a buyer. Likewise, credit bureaus are being forced to reevaluate their models in response to the changing business landscape brought on by Covid-19. Enter the agile credit function. The term agile has traditionally been used in the context of software development to describe an iterative approach where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional teams. It allows companies to adapt to new requests quickly and improve time-to-market. Agile is all about being nimble and responsive - something credit bureaus are prioritizing in today’s uncertain economy.   Agile credit means finding new, faster ways of evaluating customers and determining their ability to pay, in a time when that information can change daily. “When everything shut down in March, credit people got thrown for a loop,” said Dan Meder, Vice President of Consulting, Product Marketing and Alliances for Experian Business Information Services. “They needed a way to manage that change very quickly.” That’s where having an agile credit approach comes in. “It’s about using agile principles in your credit function to respond more quickly to changing market needs,” Meder said. Using an agile credit system helps suppliers decide what kind of terms to offer their customers. Many companies are asking suppliers to extend their terms and due dates, often switching from net-30 to net-60. Suppliers then have to decide if they can trust these companies to repay them within that longer time frame, Meder said. If companies in this position use an agile credit function, they can be more responsive and confident in the terms they set out because they’re basing their credit policies on the current state of their customer environment. This requires operating with the latest possible information on how current economic conditions are affecting their customers. Meder said that making credit function more agile requires direction from the head of the credit department and other members of that department. They can also utilize software programmers if the automatic process needs to be updated or any outside consultants for specific analytical expertise. “The idea is to bring together a team of people with direct involvement in managing the credit function to assess how best to manage the customer experience given the current state of the customer environment,” he said. “This includes setting policies around risk assessment as well as credit terms and collection processes.” Meder said companies should have technology that allows them to tinker with their credit function so they can make changes quickly. “This is especially true in a fast-changing or uncertain environment such as what we are seeing with COVID-19 and the uncertain effect it is having on our economy’s future,” he said. “In fact, it is turbulent times such as these where being “agile” is most important since the credit department needs to be able to alter course quickly if the customer environment changes for better or for worse.” Consider Being Flexible With Clients While delayed payments from clients is upsetting, avoid taking your current client relationships for granted. While a more stringent approach from suppliers is understandable right now, Meder cautions companies to remember that the pandemic will end at some point. At that time, companies will remember which suppliers were flexible about payments, due dates and terms - and which companies weren’t. “If you weren’t good to them while they were struggling, they’re going to forget about you when things turn around,” Meder said. To find out how fine-tuning your company’s credit function can help it weather the current economic crisis, reach out to your Experian representative.

This year, Experian business information services released some major enhancements to our BusinessIQ product. The project was completed by a highly skilled team here at Experian and heavily driven by customer feedback. Today we'll speak with Casey Hald. one of our lead software developers as he takes us through some of the enhancements to BusinessIQ. The transcription of our interview with Casey has been lightly edited to improve readability. What was the main goal of this redesign on BusinessIQ? CH: The goal of the redesign project was to not only improve BIQ user experience and design but also update the overall framework as well.  We wanted to bring BIQ into 2020 strong and  I feel like we did that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how that process worked in this case. CH: So first I dug up the existing research material when BIQ was first being developed and used that as sort of a baseline for what BusinessIQ is all about. Since coming into Experian, I was brand new to the credit space. So having that research material was very important to me to have empathy for our users. So,  I was lucky that in the first month of joining the team I traveling across the U.S. visiting our biggest clients,  well both big and small and mom and pop companies and basically discovering why they use BIQ and you know, why it was important to them. So, they sent you out on the road to meet face to face. It wasn't just a conference calls? CH: Yeah, face to face. So we went from the West Coast to the Midwest, to the East coast and we visited companies, big and small. It was a treat. It was over 27 different participants across 16 different companies. So we got to talk to a lot of people. What were their struggles with BusinessIQ? CH: Yeah, so they love BusinessIQ for the speed and accuracy of pulling credit reports.  They choose us over our competitors because of that speed. So we wanted to make sure that with this redesign that wasn't compromised at all. And that was something that they love with the existing design. However, with the existing design, unless you are already privy to how BusinessIQ is structured, a new credit analyst coming into this pace could be somewhat confused. So we used that as sort of a baseline to decide how we wanted the redesign to go. CH: So the first thing we did was we simplified the forgot password workflow. A lot of the challenges that our customers ran into was updating their credentials, managing their credentials. With BusinessIQ, it's security first. So we require that they log in. They can't just log in and walk away, the system will just be open for people to compromise security. It refreshes every 15, 20 minutes, so sometimes they forget to log in. So we wanted to simplify that workflow by adding a remember me functionality. So that way they can plug in their credentials and can log in. We also modified the look and feel and the design to a more modern look and feel. And so that would involve what the site navigation? CH: Yeah, the sign navigation. With that we updated the layout, moving it to the side to more of a modern dashboard, which you see a lot of times with modern applications. They have navigation right here and then the content takes up the majority of the space, which is something that we wanted.  We removed search from the navigation since,  it's now in the header searches, the meat, and potatoes of BusinessIQ. What our customers use and love is search. So we wanted to take that out of the body, and give that its own container and put that right above the navigation. So it's something that becomes the focal point of the application. We also reordered the search elements based on the order of importance based on customer feedback. So it's not just alphanumeric. We reordered it based on the importance of what we learned from our users. What about pulling reports? Because I mean, our customers love to pull reports and they pull a lot of them, right? CH: Absolutely. So, when they pull the reports, it's arguably the most important workflow to BusinessIQ. They use BusinessIQ to view a credit report. So if a customer wanted to pull a new report in the old design, they would need to first search a company, view an old report, click on pull report, and then view the report configuration options, which aren't exactly super organized, and then click to view the report. So with the new design, the user searches a company views the company information alongside the report configuration options and then clicks on the report. So we've lessened the number of clicks by one or two and organized it to a step by step process. So a new credit analyst coming into space doesn't get confused about what configurations he or she needs to make. The old design requires potentially 26 form inputs while the new design contains only six. Our goal made pulling a report easier by making the configuration options into a series of steps,  as opposed to just a random configuration. What are the other big improvements? Did you do anything in credit configuration? CH: Yeah. So 85% of our users stated that they never changed the report type because they simply didn't understand what each report type contained. They didn't understand the benefits of a Premiere Profile versus a business report. So we added a summary for each report type. So any new credit analysts that come in, they can simply read the summary and understand what each report type means to them, and why they need to pull it. Since users often pull the same report, we added a separate card for past pulled reports. So it uses a one-two, three-step approach, making it super easy for a new user to use. And there's only one call out with all the options already default selected. So there are a lot fewer form inputs. So this has got to be saving our customers a ton of time. Right? It's all about productivity and making your business more efficient. Is that really how those improvements have been received? CH: Totally, and a lot of our credit analysts, when they use BusinessIQ, they're in and out in five minutes. They go in, search a company, pull a report, log out, get on with the rest of their workday. So we wanted to keep that, you know, save their time because time is the most important asset you have right? So we wanted to make sure that that was first and foremost. What about the management of reports if they're pulling a lot of reports, is the management of that been fixed or improved? CH: Absolutely. So we added a quick search filter to find exactly the report you're looking for. For a new credit analyst, we rolled up all the filters into a simple selector delimited by date.  So they always see the freshest report at the top, which is super important.  The user now has control over how many reports that they can view at once with our new paginated system,  which is utilizing Google materials design documentation. So we took kind of what they learned,  through their research and utilize that into our cards and components as well.  The business name is now the focal point instead of the date, which is super important. And we removed the reference code as it wasn't being used among users. It was a big sequence of numbers that kind of got in the way. And one of the goals of our redesign is to cut away the things that our users don't use and create focal points for the things that were most important to them.  So that's how we improved managing reports. What has the response from our clients been? CH:  luckily for me and my job, they love it.  they love the new visual direction. They say that it's pretty, which is a compliment. But they also say that it is much easier for them to use.  One of the things that we improved,  in terms of cutting things away was that the old dashboard contained 10 to 15 different cards with newsreels tasks, some charts,  portfolio charts, things that our customers didn't necessarily use first and foremost on the dashboard. They kind of just went straight to search. And when I asked them if you had a Wishlist on what you would like to see on the dashboard, what would it be? And the first thing that they said was recent reports. If you could put recent reports at the top, so that way I can always see the last report that I pulled. So I don't make a mistake of pulling that same report. That would be lovely. So,  that was one of the major things that we did. And we're seeing a lot of positive feedback,  from just that simple improvement alone,  let alone the other improvements that we've made. So,  the reports have been positive and we're continuing to keep our ears open.  We have a lot of empathy for our users and the way that they use BusinessIQ.  So we're going to continue to listen to them and, and continue to iterate on the design since the design is a very fluid solution, right? Design changes over time. So we're keeping that first and foremost for our users. What was your biggest learning? CH:  So the thing that I learned the most was how quickly our customers use the application. They go in, they search, find what they're looking for, they use it as a confirmation of address and phone number. For our credit analysts, the phone number is super important alongside address information when they're pulling a credit report. Since a lot of companies have ambiguous locations that could look like one another. So I learned that differentiating those elements was super important to them. It actually sped up their workflow. So we use that in conjunction with some of the other design decisions that we made to improve the overall user experience. So for me, being in the credit space and having the opportunity to redesign the experience I really learned from our users, that has been a privilege.

When insurance underwriters make mistakes, bad policies can cost billions. Alternative forms of data is helping change those outcomes, particularly for insurance providers in helping them identify blind spots and accurately underwrite policies. Watch our special Insurance-focused webinar titled "Beyond Credit Risk - Understanding Alternative Data" with HazardHub. Heath Foley and Carl Stronach from Experian is joined by Bob Frady from HazardHub during this lively discussion. Alternative sources of data are growing in importance in the market. The key to our data platform is constantly investing and sourcing a wider variety of data such as geographic hazards, social media, and OSHA data in order to represent a fuller picture of the health of the business.  In this one hour talk, we walk through: Utilizing property-level hazard risk assessments The growing importance of alternative sources of data How to bring superior data to power comprehensive insights Related information What is alternative and non-traditional data/

Matt Shubert, Experian's Director of Data Science and Modeling participated in a discussion about trends in AI and Machine Learning. He shared insights on how Experian Business Information Services is leveraging these technologies for clients. Matt and a panel of industry experts discuss how businesses are taking advantage of predictive analytics technology to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Webinar Highlights: - Use cases that show how AI and machine learning are helping companies be more proactive than ever - How predictive modeling can lead to more informed business decisions - What steps organizations can take to adopt an AI-enhanced analytics strategy that works for them - And more! Panelists: Puravee Bhattacharya, Senior Data Scientist and Analytics, BI & Performance Reporting at Energia Nirupam Srivastava, Vice President - Strategy and AI at Hero Enterprise Matt Shubert, Director of Data Science and Modeling at Experian

In 2019, 3 in 5 businesses noticed an increase in fraud over a 12-month period. Today, in the face of COVID-19 and the economic downturn, it’s safe to assume that these numbers have increased. In this Sip and Solve session, Experian's commercial fraud expert, Li Mao, discusses the process of introducing friction into credit processes to discourage fraudsters. He'll also talk about: The most common types of fraud you can expect during COVID-19 What first party fraud is and how you can detect it Tips on how you can combat first party fraud and more WATCH RECORDING

Experian and Moody's Analytics have just released the Q1 2020 Main Street Report. The report brings deep insight into the overall financial well-being of the small-business landscape, as well as offer commentary on business credit trends, and what they mean for lenders and small-businesses. After just one quarter, there’s no doubt the theme of 2020 is the pandemic, Covid-19. Unrelated to the pandemic, and subsequent shuttering of a swath of economies across the world, delinquencies rose in the first quarter. This was occurring as businesses reduced their borrowing. Lower borrowing will not have lasted long though, as government efforts to aid small business have taken the form of SBA lending. In Q1, the slowing of businesses pursuing credit pushed moderately delinquent balances up to 1.61 percent from 1.60 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019. # DPD Q1 19 Q4 19 Q1 20 Moderately delinquent 31–90 1.74% 1.60% 1.61% Severely delinquent 91+ 3.35% 2.29% 2.68% Bankruptcy 0.16% 0.16% 0.16% The bankruptcy rate was essentially flat in the first quarter, rising to 16.3 basis points from 16.1 in Q4. But the rate increased as fewer firms were reported as having active credit balances. The Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Survey indicates lenders are seeing higher demand than usual for Commercial & Industrial loans. This indicates the beginning of increasing loan demand this year, as small firms look to borrow to ride out lower consumer demand and remain in business. Watch the Quarterly Business Credit Review Get the full analysis of the data behind the Main Street Report by watching the experts from Experian and Moody’s in the Quarterly Business Credit Review.

During the great recession of 2008, the recovery of the U.S. economy hinged on the idea that certain institutions were just too big to fail. Bailouts ensued and the recovery effort was long and arduous. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a different kind of threat to the U.S. economy, grinding the wheels of commerce to a crawl, forcing millions of businesses to temporarily close and lay off workers. The Federal Government passed the CARES act, including the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program. These bold relief efforts, while helpful to many, came too late as a flood of businesses sought bankruptcy protection through the courts.  With only a few states planning to loosen social distancing and safe at home restrictions, the courts are being forced to improvise. So in this post, we spoke to an attorney, Scott Blakely about a couple of unique cases involving iconic American retail brands. The first Tent Sale   Over 60 years ago, Michigan entrepreneur Art Van Elsander opened the first of seven Art Van furniture outlets. By the time they opened their seventh store, cash flow was an issue. On the brink of bankruptcy they came up with a novel idea — erecting a huge tent in the parking lots of the stores to attract crowds of shoppers, and drive-up cash flow, hatching the first-ever “Tent Sale.”  Art Van Furniture ran tv ads all the time and were a major sponsor of America’s Thanksgiving Parade.  In the 1990s when the parade organizers ran into financial difficulty Art Van Elsander wrote a $250,000 personal check so that the parade could go on. Art Van Elsander passed away in 2018. Fast forward to early March 2020, Art Van Furniture had grown to become a $1.4 billion retail juggernaut with 141 stores and 3,700 employees. By March 8th, battered by tariffs on Chinese furniture imports, Art Van Furniture filed for Chapter 11.  Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, debtors are left in control of the business and provided an injunction that prevents creditors from collecting debts or recovering collateral.  Three days after filing, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic, and on March 13th the Trump administration declared a national emergency, forcing non-essential businesses to close. 🚨 BREAKING 🚨 "We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic"-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A — World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020 The two announcements crippled Art Van’s ability to conduct a tent sale so they filed a request of the court to convert their case from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. Under Chapter 7, the management of the company loses control and a trustee is appointed by the court. Under Chapter 7 the chances of debt recovery are greatly reduced. In Art Van Furniture’s case, remaining shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic would result in expenses eclipsing any potential revenues generated for creditors. Their hand was forced, and the courts took action. We asked our legal expert Scott Blakeley to give us his take and here’s what he said: “In Art Van’s case, the pandemic destroyed a strategy to operate to prepare for the sale of all its assets as a going concern to Levin Furniture’s former owner, so as to capture that value to distribute to unsecured creditors.  Art Van’s alternate strategy to pause the Chapter 11 proceedings until the pandemic passed was not workable as it could not meet the accruing administrative expenses.  Rather, Art Van was forced to implement a going out of business strategy for all of its stores.  In the initial days of the store closing sales, deposits from inventory sales dropped from $23 million to just $8 million in their final week." "Continued negotiations with creditors to pause Chapter 11 proceedings and conserve cash to meet fee obligations and pay former employees also fell through. In the middle of proceedings, the Judge ordered Art Van to freeze any spending in order to have the company declare amounts owed to employees. By then, however, employees joined in suing the retailer. With no revenue coming in and no amounts to cover employee pay and health care, the Judge declared that Art Van could not choose to pay employees at the expense of other creditors without a court order. With no other options, Art Van filed their request to convert the case to a Chapter 7, handing over the decision to the Trustee and Bankruptcy Court. In Art Van’s case, the Trustee is hoping to open stores again, but that pathway is unclear given the stay-at-home orders of states.  Unsecured creditors are not expected to receive a distribution.” Landlords cry foul over Modell’s bankruptcy pause Morris A. Modell opened the first Modell’s Sporting Goods on Cortland Street in Lower Manhattan in 1889. On March 11th, 2020 that run ended when they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, announcing they would be closing all 134 stores, citing declining interest in sporting apparel. They had planned an orderly liquidation to proceed through the month of April and sell a portion of their stores. But the Government imposed closure of non-essential businesses hampered those efforts so on March 23rd Modell’s requested and were granted a period of suspense in their bankruptcy case until April 30th, citing a rarely used Section 305 provision. Ordinarily, rent must be paid to the landlord post-bankruptcy, with the exception of a limited grace period for cause, and COVID-19 would be such a case.  So landlords in this case got the short end of the stick, they cannot collect rent or evict. Scott Blakeley offers the following assessment of what happened with Modell’s: “With its chapter 11 filing, Modell’s was forced to liquidate its assets through going–out–of–business (GOB) sales at its retail locations.  However, COVID-19 restrictions shuttered the GOB sales. Modell’s motioned the bankruptcy court to suspend the GOB sales given the COVID crisis and the resulting stay-at-home orders.  The court order allowed Modell’s to suspend payments to landlords for post-petition rent since the retailer could not conduct their GOB sales at the stores.  Other retailers in chapter 11 are likely to follow Modell’s strategy to suspend post-petition payments to landlords as social isolation orders continue. Given Covid-19 and stay at home orders, debtors and even creditors may benefit at some level (other than landlords) from the suspension of chapter 11 as debtors can preserve the value of their business as it stays in place, lenders can preserve the value of their collateral by not being forced to seek a premature sale or liquidation, and unsecured creditors may increase the likelihood of a distribution through enhanced values of GOB sales.  The chapter 11 case suspension is expected to extend through May 30th, but landlords are expected to oppose.” Scott Blakeley is the founder of Blakeley, LLP, a noted expert in the field of creditors’ rights, commercial law, e-commerce, and bankruptcy law. Scott regularly speaks to industry groups around the country and via monthly webcasts on the topics of creditors' rights and bankruptcy.