Income Insights from categorised bank transactions

A Mortgage Team can verify applicant incomes instantly and reliably – allowing better, faster underwriting, with big time and cost savings.

A Customer Management Team can instantly pick out customers slipping into vulnerability – allowing them to offer support well before arrears and collections.

These are just some of the reasons lenders are excited about Income Insights.

Cutting through income complexity

For lenders, knowing how much a customer earns is more important – but also more complex – than ever before.

Mortgage applications, risk modelling, fraud checks, identifying and supporting vulnerable customers early – all these and much more depend on knowing a customer’s source and amount of income – regular and irregular.

However, this is also getting harder to work out.

Forty years ago, it was straightforward: usually one stable, regular salary or set of wages hit an account each week or month.

Now customers with multiple employers, employment combined with self-employment, short-term contracts and gig work, property income, and often-changing employers are much more common. So, an individual’s income picture is now usually much more complex and personalised.

Allied to this is the current Cost of Living Crisis and the impact of increases in fuel prices, tax hikes and rising cost of inflation so the need to accurately assess and individual’s income is more pressing than ever before, both when applying for credit, but also monitoring repayment of credit.

Income Insights cuts through this complexity. A transaction-categorisation service available for batch analysis on the cloud or real-time powered by Open Banking, taking the pain out of verifying and quantifying income.

Big benefits for lenders

After drawing down current-account data, Income Insights uses it to give lenders a verified set of insights. For each customer income-source it provides:

• the source(s)
• the work sector(s) that stream comes from
• the cadence of payments from that source
• the median amount paid
• first and last payment dates
• whether the payment is still going

Income Insights can provide this for up to 13 different categories of income in even the most complex accounts. These categories range from aggregates of all recurring income through to picking out important one-off payments. Crucially, it can be used in a joint account to untangle income streams belonging to one individual or another.

Income Insights can also be used across millions of accounts to identify macro trends in a portfolio.

This ability to switch from taking in the landscape of a portfolio to forensically examining one account gives lenders important benefits:

• In Originations – automate the income verification process, rather than having to use underwriters, saving time and significant costs. For higher value credit items such as mortgages and auto loans this is particularly important
• In Risk Modelling – help risk managers identify key trends across portfolios and anticipate emerging risks
• In Fraud Prevention – find patterns and irregularities in income to power fraud identification models
• In Customer Management – use a range of key metrics to identify vulnerable and potentially vulnerable customers and support them before significant financial trouble hits

In all these cases, Income Insights provides more in-depth, detailed complementary insight to bureau income analysis from sources such as CATO – allowing lenders to have more personalised, profitable and risk-controlled interactions with customers throughout their relationship.

To learn more about how Income Insights can make that happen for you, please get in touch.