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Real-time credit decisions: Putting big data to work

Published: June 20, 2017 by Guest Contributor

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Call it big data, smart data or evidence-based decision-making. It’s not just the latest fad, it’s the future of how business will be guided and grow.

Here are a few telling stats that show data is exploding and a new age is upon us:

  • Data is growing faster than ever before, and we’re on track to create about 1.7 megabytes of new information per person every second by 2020.
  • The social universe—which includes every digitally connected person—doubles in size every two years. By 2020, it will reach 44 zettabytes or 44 trillion gigabytes, according to CIO.
  • In 2015, more than 1 billion people used Facebook and sent an average of 31.25 million messages and viewed 2.77 million videos each minute. More than 100 terabytes of data is uploaded daily to the social channel.
  • By 2020, more than 6.1 billion smartphone users will exist globally. And there will be more than 50 billion smart connected devices in the world, all capable of collecting, analyzing and sharing a wealth of data.
  • More than one-third of all data will pass through or exist in the cloud by 2020.
  • The IDC estimates that by 2020, business transactions on the internet—business-to-business and business-to-consumer—will reach 450 billion per day.

All of this new data means we’ll be looking at a whole new set of possibilities and a new level of complexity in the years ahead. The data itself is of great value, however, lenders need the right automated decisioning platform to store, collect, quickly process and analyze the volumes of consumer data to gain accurate consumer stories.

While lenders don’t necessarily need to factor in decisioning on social media uploads and video views, there is an expectation for immediacy to know if a consumer is approved, denied or conditioned.

Online lenders have figured out how to quickly capture and understand big data, and are expected to account for $122 billion in lending by 2020. This places more pressure on banks and credit unions to enhance their technology to cut down on loan approval times and move away from various manual touch points.

Critics of automated decisioning solutions used in lending cite compliance issues, complacency by lenders and lack of human involvement. But a robust platform enables lenders to improve and supplement their current decisioning processes because it is:

Agile: Experian hosts our client’s solutions and decisioning strategies, so we are able to make and deploy changes quickly as the needs of the market and business change, and deliver real-time instant decisions while a consumer is at the point of sale. A hosted environment also means reduced implementation timelines, as no software or hardware installation is required, allowing lenders to recognize value faster.

A data work horse: Internal and external data can be pulled from multiple sources into a lender’s decisioning model. Lenders may also access an unlimited number of scores and attributes—including real-time access to credit bureau data—and integrate third-party data sources into the decisioning engine.

Powerful: A robust decision engine is capable of calculating numerous predictive attributes and custom scoring models, and can also test new strategies against current decision models or perform “what if” simulations on historical data.

Data collection, storage and analysis are here to stay. As will be the businesses which are savvy enough to use a solution that can find opportunities and learnings in all of that complex data, quickly curate the best possible actions to take for positive outcomes, and allow lenders and marketers to execute on those recommendations with the click of a button.

To learn more about Experian’s decisioning solutions, you can additionally explore our PowerCurve and Attribute Toolbox solutions.

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