As a digital transformation evangelist with years of experience in the financial and banking industry, I have helped many Fortune 500 clients future-proof their lending programs by providing intelligent solutions, especially in the decision risk management area. Through these engagements, I’ve observed that many lenders compromise their agility in rolling out a decisioning solution due to delays and challenges in the initial steps of evaluating and onboarding the right data sources. Customer needs and expectations are changing in real-time so lenders must eliminate barriers to their own agility to stay in the game. 

Below are few activities I’ve observed that compromise lenders’ agility: 

• Choosing the Right Data Provider: Considering there are thousands of data providers across many lines of businesses, lenders always have to spend a lot of time choosing the right data provider for their decision strategy. Lenders must evaluate each data provider in each region by the line of business, review their doc specs, figure out ways to test their API in their decision solution, and then, based on the outcome, initiate the onboarding discussion. These activities often significantly delay the implementation of a risk decision solution and ultimately, delay better outcomes for the end customer. 
• Onboarding Data Providers: Onboarding a data provider involves a series of discussions around pricing, legal contracts, support, etc., and again becomes a bottleneck in the lender’s agility to roll out products to end customers.
• Switching Data Providers: Considering the effort required to onboard a data provider, lenders often default to their existing data provider and keep using the same data for their new risk decision solution or product. It’s like building a new car with an old engine designed for a different model.  They should put a mechanism in place to easily choose and switch to the data providers that best augment the overall risk decision solution.
• Keeping Pace Data Sources: As data types are exponentially growing, data providers are offering new data sources, and it is hard for lenders to keep pace with who has what data. Most of the time, lenders default to using the same data type even if there are alternative data products in the market that offer new, more relevant, and deeper insights.

These activities are repeated for each data source and, on average, add a week to a month to making the data available for building a risk decision strategy around it.

To create true agility in launching a risk decisioning platform, lenders need a one-stop hub that offers easy access to a variety of data types so they can evaluate, integrate and easily build decision models around it instead of waiting for months. And having the right data source is as important as having a robust, agile risk decisioning platform.

The Provenir Data Cloud + Provenir Marketplace provides a wide variety of data sources in the lending ecosystem, along with advanced search capability to discover and detect trusted data sources based on geographic location, data type, product type, etc. It’s out of the box, prebuilt API provides seamless integration with available data sources such as credit bureaus, identification and fraud, collateral, alterative credit data, etc. 

The combination of discovering the right data sources and using an out of box prebuilt API allows the lender to quickly switch between different data providers. With a simple click of the button, they can integrate new data sources into their decision strategy seamlessly without having direct contact with the data provider. The lender can test the respective data and enable it for the end customer on the fly once satisfied with the desired test outcome.

Provenir Data Cloud + Marketplace helps lenders be more agile, responding quickly to changing data needs and focusing their time and energy on innovating their financial product.